Rineke Dijkstra, who was born in Sittard in the Netherlands in 1959, studied at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and after doing some commissioned work for magazines, soon found international recognition for her penetrating coloured portrait series of teenagers and young adults. She has taken photographs - sometimes over longer periods of time - of boys and girls of different nationalities on the beach, the development of an adolescent Bosnian girl refugee at intervals of two years, young mothers shortly after giving birth, young Israelis before and after their recruitment into the army, young bullfighters after the fight; these are all categories in Dijkstra's "classical" portraits, registering the changes brought about in the faces and bodily attitudes of her subjects by an important experience or a crucial event in their lives.
Rineke Dijkstra has received the Kodak Award Nederland in 1987 and was nominated for the Young European Photographers in 1990; she received the Werner Mantz Award in 1994 and the Citybank Private Bank Photography Prize in 1999. Her work is already considered to be at the top of the current photography world. This monograph is published to coincide with the retrospective exhibition being held in Paris, Winterthur and Amsterdam in 2005-2006.