For last weekend’s article about the impact earlier puberty is having on the Leipzig boys choir, we asked the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra to take pictures of the singers. She has a longstanding interest in what she calls “moments of transformation” in people. Her past projects have included, for example, a series of portraits of Almerisa, a Bosnian girl she has photographed every couple of years since meeting her at a refugee center in the Netherlands nearly 20 years ago, as well as Olivier, whose training as a French Foreign Legion officer she documented over several years. This time, in addition to taking pictures of members of the boys choir, Dijkstra also made a short film of some of them rehearsing Mendelssohn’s “Jauchzet dem Herrn, alle Welt.”
Dijkstra’s last contribution to the magazine was this portrait of Cate Blanchett, which appeared in our 2007 Oscars portfolio. It is currently part of the traveling exhibition of The New York Times Magazine Photographs book.
