“The act of representing others almost always involves violence to the subject of representation.” ~Edward Said, In the Shadow of the West

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” ~Susan Sontag, On Photography

Left:Forte da Casa, Portugal, May 20, 2000. Smeared with blood from a fresh kill, bullfighters leave the ring for a sitting with Dijkstra. Adrenaline-pumped, but exhauseted, the gaze connotes both prowess and fear.

Defense attorneys in the recent murder case of Jodi Aria wanted to allow the jury to see enhanced photographs of the eyes of the victim, Travis Alexander, in the last moments of his life before he was stabbed and shot to death, The assertion was that they revealed a reflection of the accused holding a camera, not a knife, as originally claimed. In this way, the images of the viewer and the viewed would appear innocently merged, at an instant when his life apparently hung in the balance. While this example stands out as a far more literal example of Edward Said’s “act of representing always involves violence to the subject,” it certainly hints at the intrusion on the boundaries of the Self and the sense of intimate knowledge imparted to the viewer, when we permit the camera to become our eyes on the world. This same power of intimate intrusion is rarely more powerfully evinced than in the hyperrealist portrait work of Rineke Dijkstra.

I had the opportunity to attend the press preview of the Dijkstra retrospective at the Guggenheim, New York, in October, 2012, and to hear her comment on her work. For over two decades, she has been capturing the awkward honesty of youth and the utter vulnerability of early adulthood, in all its painstaking detail. She explains, “I like it when everything is reduced to its essence. You try to get things to reach a climax—moment of truth.” Shot against neutral or indistinguishable backgrounds — the generic horizon of the ocean, the backroom of a rocker dance club, dirty hospital walls, or the private room of a bullfighting arena — Dijkstra’s portraits recall more of the formal classicism of Dutch master paintings than contemporary photographs. And like the Masters, she captures her subjects as they stare frankly into the camera. The where of the photo shoot becomes secondary to who they are. Regarding this point, Dijkstra says, “Precisely by bringing life to a standstill, you can capture things that go unnoticed, day to day, the unexpected or the unusual—it has to do with the extraordinary quality of the ordinary.”

And a deeper questioning of the “truth” of who these emerging adolescent subjects are in Dijkstra’s portraits, can serve as a stepping-off point for a more profound philosophical and psychoanalytic analysis of the emerging personalities and modes of self expression at key stages in adolescent development. Her stark images often portray her subjects at unguarded or self-conscious moments. It has been said that her voyeuristic and exploitative style has the effect of making the viewer as uncomfortable as the subject. To understand what it is about these photographs that elicit such strong reactions, it is important to recognize what they have in common. What is it about Dijkstra’s seemingly straight-forward photographs that make them so personal and probing?”

In Dijkstra’s portraits, the subject is almost always gazing intently at the camera lens, connecting directly with the imagined viewer, as if to offer implicit consent to being viewed, just as he or she appears in the moment. Yet, in spite of being given every opportunity to prepare, posturing themselves to project the most ideal self-image, Dijkstra’s technique manages to capture that rare unguarded moment. Her photographs show us that people do not always look the way they think they do, and paired with the penetrating gazes of her subjects, viewers are being asked to consider their own self-projections.

Dijkstra’s work captures the uncomfortable, self-conscious moments, when the subject is most likely experiencing the basic desire to conceal what shouldn’t be seen, a desire that many might find uncomfortable, as they project their own experience onto the subject and, thus, have it become an uncomfortable reflection on themselves, as viewers. In a society of eye-witness accounts and spontaneous social media-generated moments, we remain conditioned to feel uncomfortable when we see vulnerable people framed in a light—and at a moment—of self-conscious embarrassment or exposure to the gaze of strangers, when they—and we—are least ready to take it in. Her work explores the question: are we prepared to see people for who they are, or is there a shared fiction that allows us to put on a public face, concealing our true identity? In many of Dijkstra’s intimate portraits, the immediate dilemma on the part of the viewer is to repress the impulse to look away, while combating the desire to remain, eyes coldly fixed on the subject.

Dijkstra’s young subjects reveal their underlying vulnerability under the unblinking gaze of the camera lens, yielding up a not-fully-formed ego, with all their attendant awkwardness. What prevents Dijkstra’s photographs from becoming blatantly exploitative is often the presence of the subjects’ direct gaze. This gaze has the effect of projecting compliance, but also, in its usual earnestness, implores the viewer to ‘believe’ the subject—to take for granted the subject’s honesty and openness with the camera—in spite of their overt self-consciousness. This, in itself, is tricky, as these photographs often achieve their eerie, disquieting ambience by means of an essential directness on the subject’s part, they appear to be struggling at times to fill the gap between intention and effect; between what they want people to know about them and what they can’t help people from knowing, as they stare frankly into the camera. At the opening of her Guggenheim retrospective, she explained her method for achieving this: “I force my subjects hold their pose for so long that eventually they stop posing, the novelty of the camera forgotten. I am interested in photographing people at moments when they have dropped all pretense of a pose.”

Dijkstra’s approach to her work seems to belie Susan Sontag’s observation about photography that, “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” The power of the gaze to intrude, invade, rape or destroy has long been attributed to the masculine character. Writing on this topic, John Berger, in his Ways of Seeing, says, ”Contemporary gender ideologies envisage men as active doers and women as passive presence—men by what they do to others, women by their attitudes towards themselves. This has led to women focusing on how they appear to others, and so to fragment themselves into two parts—the surveyor and the surveyed…one might simply say by this: men act and women appear. Women watch themselves being looked at…[and] the surveyor of women in herself is male.”

In much of Dijkstra’s work, the artist’s active feminine gaze—mitigated through the camera lens, along with the subject’s returned, direct eye contact, working in conjunction with the ultimate recipient, the viewer—has an oppositional effect. Shared eye contact mitigates the usual power dynamic by disrupting the authority and dominance of the photographer (and, by extension the gallery visitor/voyeur), placing all three entities on a level playing field.

The power of Dijkstra’s pictorial representations provokes a visceral responses, as the Self seeks to mitigate the gap between our ideal identity and the actual one that accompanies the incoming visual data. This perspective contends that Dijkstra’s photographs invite a heightened cross-cultural social sensitivity, enacted through a “regime of visibility” in which the look in her images is crucial for the viewer to identify the other and develop unconscious strategies, based on visual data, to account for the mirrored self, together with the other in the same paradigm. The power of her photographs resides in the intersection of the gaze, serving as the locus of self-identification and the conflict that arises when attempting to effectively integrate the other. The creative tension in her work is framed by the inherent contradictions to be found in this process—when the Self cannot successfully incorporate the other as an other—that psychic space is opened up for continuing resistance and distancing.

Dijkstra’s method of stripping out the background behind her subjects of any objects with carried meaning invites the viewer to read intent in the gaze and overall presentation of the subject, alone, independent of what the photographer or caption beside the image may intend. The reader, in other words, in invited into the mythological mode of representation of the subject—the consciousness behind their eyes—to unreservedly connect with the other. The viewer’s return gaze is structured by their own spectrum of experiences and values, beginning, according to philosopher Roland Barthes, with language—both instilled and learned—contextualized by constructs from a semiological chain which pre-exists with the same signifying function; that is they constitute a language-object.

Above right: Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus (1486), Uffizi, Florence; lower right: Hilton Head, S.C., June 22, 1992. Shot at a low angle, the figure’s stance appears contrappostos against a low horizon. The power of the gaze is isolated from all other competing elements; the stance suggesting both grace and self-consciousness in the model’s reserved body language.

Barthes would contend that the stand-alone representation of subjects in Dijkstra’s photographs is the “raw material of myth; their unity [is found in] that they all come down to the status of a mere language…myth wants to see in them a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain.” From this language-object, a meta-language construct emerges, a global linguistic schema in which “the semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures…” It is in this way that visual interpretation of culturally-charged material in Dijkstra’s portraits reach the second order of mythological representation, implying a larger ideological order, in which her subjects—adolescent, mother, bull fighter, soldier, etc.—become unwitting players in a grand social construct relying on the codification of language to affirm it.

Since we can only know the nature of the unconscious through speech and language, relationships that characterize forms of language also characterize the relationships between unconscious elements. The unconscious therefore, has its own structure and constitutes itself like a language; and like a language, it speaks through us, rather than through the language we might speak.

Thus, the gaze (between photographer-to-subject, subject-to-photographer and subject-to viewer) ‘speaks’ through the structural context of reading the signs, i.e.-language. And, within this fixed gaze into the camera’s eye resides the foundational basis that ties all three entities together in a psychodynamic power play. Capturing the direct look into the camera with the click of the shutter (she calls this moment, “a record of their interaction.”) suggests the acknowledgement by the photographer that his/her subject no longer occupies the realm of object, but projects a conscious ego—an other with delimited boundaries arising from self awareness. This look has the effect of short-circuiting the voyeurism normally associated with the posing ritual—there can be no peeping when the subject meets the other’s gaze. Additional, the subject is reaffirming the confrontational moment by visually communicating the message, “I see you seeing me, so you cannot steal this look (Self).” From this position of the subject’s empowerment, the gaze does not contest the right of the viewer (photographer, viewer) to look, and may in fact be ‘read’ as the subject’s assent to being surveyed.

Dijkstra captures a wide range of gazes in her photographs: from hardened; dazed; self-reliant; friendly; vacant; to seductive. Facial characteristics and body posture become important clues to measuring the visceral response of the viewer. I had the opportunity to observe members of the press corps, as they toured the exhibit on a day when the museum was closed. Viewer response to those images that pictured the subject smiling, vulnerable or with neutral expressions elicited longer periods of time in front of the figure than those that offered determined, glaring or threatening facial characteristics. It seemed the viewer was engaging with the personality captured on film, as though it were an authentic social interaction; friendly or inviting ‘greetings’ were reciprocated with additional moments spent in front of the image, neutral or hostile facial expressions were soon passed by. Men had the most difficulty with the images of parturient mothers, particularly the mother with a thread of fresh blood running down her leg. Dijkstra explained to me: “Men have a hard time with these images, because they don’t like to associate pain with the women they love. The three mothers who agreed in advance to pose for me seemed dazed and tired, but they were stoic and cooperative, in spite of the discomfort.”

In this sense, gaze in photography (or painting), refers to the uncanny sense that the object of our eye’s look or glance is somehow looking back at us, of its own will. This uncanny feeling of being gazed at by the object of our look affects us in the same way as castration anxiety (reminding us of the deficiencies at the heart of the Symbolic order). We may believe that we are in control of our eye’s look; however, any feeling of scopophilic power is always undone by the fact that the materiality of existence (the Real) always exceeds and undercuts the meaning structures of the Symbolic order. When considering a Dijkstra photograph, the first sense is one of control over the viewer’s look; however, the unremitting gaze of the subject, as it stares back—the object of our eye’s look, looking back at us—becomes reminiscent of the fact that the symbolic order is separated only by a fragile border from the materiality of the Real. Dijkstra’s representations of desire, vulnerability, self-empowerment and self-emergence are placed beyond our reach and ability to control—a magical floating object reflects our own separateness—in the figure of the awkward teen on the beach, or the hardened Buzz Club dancer.”

Art critic, Victor Burgin, in his essay, Photography, Fantasy, Function, offers a compelling model for understanding the empowerment strategy engaged in by the ego, as the viewer endeavors to engage the image. He speaks of the way the viewer is sutured into a photograph. The metaphor is meant to suggest how the viewer becomes attached, gaining entrance into the photograph, not through a spot freely chosen, but “forced” (this violent reference alluding to the metaphor of “suturing,” no doubt) to follow the camera’s eye to the central point of the image. Psychoanalytically, this strategy is intended to avoid a metaphorical annihilation of ourselves in the face of the potency of the unresolvable connection to the gaze embedded in the photograph.

The primary way the individual is “sutured” into the photograph, Burgin continues, is through the necessary identification between the viewer and the assumed camera position, a look which can “shift between the poles of voyeurism and narcissism: in the former…subjecting the other-as-object to an inquisitive and controlling surveillance in which seeing is dissociated from being seen; and in the latter, effecting a dual identification with both the camera (photographer) and the individual being depicted”(189). As Dijkstra states it, “Although my photographs are mostly portraits of individuals, I like them to become universal, like metaphors that can stand for the entire group.” The voyeuristic look requires and promotes distance between the viewer and the subject, while narcissistic identification promotes at least the illusion that the photograph is a mirror. The power of the gaze in Dijkstra’s photographs becomes a hyper-real signifier, cutting the viewer off from the established definitional, Symbolic order, that language would ordinarily provide. Once this imaginary threat to the viewer’s narcissistic ideal is challenged, the returned gaze (which will not be reciprocated) is “forced” to “read” the image in ways that mitigates estrangement, annihilation and castration, thereby re-establishing the perpetually-striving ideal-I.

Few photographers, especially those working in portraiture, are able to elicit an immediate gut reaction from viewers in the way that Rineke Dijkstra has. We are unaccustomed to thinking of portraiture in terms beyond the keepsake, tribute, or historical document. But Dijkstra somehow manages to make strangers relevant and relatable to us in ways that may or may not be pleasant or enjoyable. Her images take on an emotional charge—not because they are dramatic or cleverly contrived—but because they reflect back a mirror view of our own Selves, unadulterated and in sharp focus. What does it mean, then, when we’re faced with images of people we don’t necessarily feel a relationship to, but are affected by, nonetheless? We react because in the intensity of their gaze—one that cuts through the idea of a photograph merely as an inanimate form and seizes us as people—as a genuine encounter. Everyone believes that he or she has control over how much of the self is showing, and how effectively the rest is hidden. Dijkstra’s gaze asks those that gaze back: “If I can’t conceal myself, how can you be sure that you are able to, either?”

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor