Rineke Dijkstra’s Absorbing Portraits

For the past two decades, Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra has aimed her lens at absorbing human subjects, from awkward adolescents discovered on beaches to figures disarmed by extreme exhaustion—baby-faced matadors following a bullfight, for instance, or young mothers right after childbirth. Some 70 of these portraits, in addition to five video works, are now assembled in a major midcareer retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Especially striking are serial images taken of a single person, such as Olivier, above, whom Dijkstra shot as an enlistee in the French Foreign Legion and later as a hardened soldier. February 18–May 28; sfmoma.org