"Hel, Poland, August 12, 1998," from Beach Portraits

Rineke Dijkstra's images of adolescent bathers, photographed on beaches in the United States and Eastern Europe since 1992, have established the artist as an important figure in contemporary art and one of the most visible and highly regarded Dutch artists of her generation. Dijkstra's portraits of children and adolescents—alone and in small groups—are characterized by a remarkable formal classicism, psychological depth, and conceptual rigor. In many respects, the artist's cool detachment and clinical attention to detail can be understood in documentary terms. Taken as a whole, Dijkstra's project might be understood as a quasi-scientific, cross-cultural, sociological study of human behavior in front of a camera.