Rineke Dijkstra’s Lens on Girlhood

In the opening pages of the Jeffrey Eugenides 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, Cecila Lisbon finds herself in hospital after a suicide attempt. The doctor asks, ‘What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets,’ to which Cecilia responds, ‘Obviously, Doctor … you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’ ¹1. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides, originally
published 1993, p. 5.

The scene captures the tension between innocence and experience, youth and adulthood, ultimately demonstrating a general societal dismissal of the often complex issues associated with girlhood and coming of age. Eugenides’ novel follows the five teenage Lisbon sisters alongside the neighbourhood boys whose fixation with the unknowable girls becomes the driving narrative force.

Photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who lives and works in Amsterdam, explores similar themes of identity, representation and transitional periods in her photographic practice, seeking to intimately represent adolescence through portrait making. Dijkstra’s photograph Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 27, 1992, recently acquired with the support of the Bowness Family Fund for Photography, toys with concepts relating to girlhood and how adolescent girls – often overlooked or camera-shy – are represented, perceived and understood in art. Also supported by the Bowness Family Fund for Photography is Castricum aan Zee, the Netherlands, May 28, 1992, which captures a group of teenage boys photographed on a beach in the Netherlands. The depiction of the awkward teens is reminiscent of the young boys in The Virgin Suicides, who are the unreliable narrators of the Lisbon sisters’ story, reflecting back to readers the loss of innocence associated with coming of age.

Dijkstra’s exploration of adolescence sees her typically photographing youth, creating portraits typified by young subjects placed in the centre of the frame, often against neutral backgrounds. In Dijkstra’s well-established style, she captures the liminal stage of adolescence, when her subjects are seemingly caught between childhood and adulthood. In Kolobrzeg, this is further highlighted by the contrapposto poses of the girls, whereby they display an active stillness.

Much like the Eugenides in his novel, Dijkstra depicts the teenage girls at a pivotal moment in their lives, providing a small glimpse into their world, allowing us to ponder the ways in which adolescents, especially adolescent girls, are observed, framed and perceived in art and media. We are in the place of the doctor, asking Dijkstra’s subjects, ‘What are you doing here, honey?’ Kolobrzeg depicts a group of five teenage girls standing on a beach in Poland. In the full-body portrait, they stare down the lens with ambivalent expressions, directly addressing the viewer. When taking her photographs, Dijkstra asks her subjects to ‘concentrate’,²Alison Dean, ‘Intimacy at work: Nan Goldin and
Rineke Dijkstra’, History of Photography, vol. 39, no. 2,
June 2015, p. 188 and it is through this process, alongside the use of an unobstructive background, that we glean aspects of their personalities:

Bare backgrounds, lack of props, and simple posing strips away any real context, and forces the viewer to observe small details about the subjects, revealing their deeply human qualities. ³Madeline Lerner, ‘Rineke Dijkstra: Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive’, Musee Magazine, 14 Nov. 2023, , accessed 21 Jan. 2025

This approach to composition means the small details, such as the teens’ body language and relation to one another, are impossible to ignore. Are the girls showing contempt? Discomfort? Confidence? Dijkstra captures them both proudly presenting a version of themselves to the world whilst expressing the awkward self-consciousness of adolescence.⁴Lauren Vanzandt-Escobar, ‘Rineke Dijkstra’s
Retrospective: identity and the expressive fallacy’, The
American Reader, , accessed 21 Jan. 2025

The direct eye contact of the girls, their full-body representation and the low camera angle gives the subjects some agency. The girls are aware of the camera’s gaze and tower over the photographer. The physical print of the image stands at 1.5 metres tall, demanding attention and gravitas within the gallery space.

In Kolobrzeg, gazes intersect. Each subject stares through the photographer and directly at the viewer. We stare back, examining their expressions and gestures. Captured is a quiet contemplation of youth, leaving the viewer to wonder about the subject’s inner world. We are trying to understand them, just as they appear to be trying to understand us in a silent dialogue with no resolution. The subjects are both objects of observation and agents of their own expression. It is a delicate balance between self-agency and voyeurism, speaking to the relationship between photographer and subject, subject and viewer.

In The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbon sisters are isolated in their own home, similar to how the teens in Kolobrzeg are photographed in a decontextualised space. Additionally, the novel’s Lisbon sisters become objects of the neighbourhood boys’ obsessive gaze. The boys, unreliable narrators and teens themselves, project on to them imagined truths, highlighting the gulf between perception and reality and society’s misjudgement of the depth and strength of teenage girls. As described by Eugenides himself, ‘the girls are created by the intention of the observer, and there are so many points of view that they don’t exist as an exact identity’. ⁵Megan Abbott, ‘The Virgin Suicides: “They Hadn’t
Heard Us Calling”’, The Criterion Collection, 18 Apr.
2018, , accessed 21
Jan. 2025.
We are destined to do the same in viewing and attempting to decipher Kolobrzeg.

The way young adult identities are depicted in Dijkstra’s Kolobrzeg, and her wider practice, is further enhanced through considering wider media’s representations of girlhood. In a poetic resolve, the chorus of narrators in The Virgin Suicides conclude that ‘we knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death’.⁶Eugenides, p. 40 They realise that the girls are not just naive adolescents but individuals capable of deep and complex thought, much more than an image could ever capture.

Anna Grubel is NGV Project Assistant, Curatorial.

The NGV warmly thanks the Bowness Family Foundation for their support of the photographs Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 27, 1992, and Castricum aan Zee, the Netherlands, May 28, 1992 by Rineke Dijkstra for the NGV Collection.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 56 Jan–Feb 2026.

Notes