“I feel an affinity with the tradition of documentary photography, but my photographs nevertheless have aspects that make them different. I’m attracted to portraiture because of the personal relationships I develop with people I meet and am interested in. These are encounters where, each time, something happens and a certain emotional interaction takes place. I’m looking for something that’s real. To me photography means that you can point to something and show other people the unexpected, the unusual. Precisely by bringing life to a standstill, you can capture things that often go unnoticed day to day–it has to do with the extraordinary quality of the ordinary. I’ve chosen photography as a medium for making art because I want to show something that cannot be expressd in any other.”

-Artist Rineke Dijkstra, in an interview with Jan van Adrichem that appears in the catalogue accompanying “Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective,” which opens today at the Guggenheim

Above: “Vondelpark, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 19, 2005.” © Rineke Dijkstra (Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot)