Following the successful showing here of her video Annemiek in 1999, Anthony d'Offay Gallery is exhibiting a new group of photographs by the Dutch artist, Rineke Dijkstra.

Dijkstra won the Citibank Prize for Photography in 1999 with her beach-portraits, and works from that series were also recently included in the Saatchi Gallery's Eurovision exhibition together with photographs of mothers with their newborn babies. For this exhibition, Dijkstra shows works arising from projects begun during her residency at the DAAD in Berlin last year. Although the tonal range and flatness of the new works link them to the tradition of Dutch genre painting, they nevertheless have more in common with paintings of landscapes than domesticity. Children and adolescents are photographed like plants or animals; they are still are rooted in the world of nature and seem all the more beautiful and vulnerable for being so. It is their invisible inner life which is the subject of the work, more than their outer appearance.

The exhibition consists of two series and a single portrait.

The first series is a group of five portraits taken in the Tiergarten park in Berlin. These focus on young and adolescent girls against the backdrop of the forest trees (a traditional fairytale background). Dijkstra took photographs in two areas, one used for picnics and barbecues and often for children's birthday parties; the other a large playing field. Sensitive to teenage awkwardness towards their bodies, Rineke Dijkstra has photographed the three eldest girls in mid-play, thus avoiding the embarrassment of the conscious pose. Aware of the viewer, the girls are nonetheless involved in their own lives. Dijkstra has captured the contradictions of adolescence: the attention to hair, clothes and jewellery imitate adulthood, whilst the seriousness with which they engage in the game - hands on hips and clenched fists - indicates a childish frustration at waiting. The youngest children, however, are photographed in the direct full-frontal pose; their look a mixture of a defiance and pride at having been singled out.

Despite the great intimacy and insight of the photographs, they never feel intrusive; a tribute to Dijkstra's ability to inspire the trust of her subjects. She has said:
I am always looking for something personal, an individual aspect: something universal. The best photos are the ones in which people strike a pose that has a certain naturalness, but is at the same time unexpected: when their pose is one that I would never have thought of. Often it's about details: a position or a certain glance.

The second series was commissioned by the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam for their new building. Rineke Dijkstra chose to photograph 15-year-old schoolgirls - the age when Anne Frank died - with their best friends. With this series, Dijkstra combines her most important themes - that of trauma, previously explored in the birth and matador photographs, and the vulnerability of childhood. The images in this exhibition were all taken in Berlin, although the series has expanded to include images of schoolgirls and boys in Milan, Barcelona and Paris.

Isabel is a close-up portrait of Rineke Dijkstra's 12-year-old neighbour. Dijkstra photographed the girl watching her favourite film, Titanic. Although she has seen the film many times, Isabel is spellbound, her eyes filled with dreams of Hollywood romance. Rineke Dijkstra's characteristic simplicity and the neutral background highlight the youth and innocence of the girl.

Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, the Netherlands in 1959. In addition to the Citibank Prize, Dijkstra has won numerous awards, including the Kodak Award Nederland (1987); the Art Encouragement Award Amstelveen (1993); and the Werner Mantz Award (1994). She lives and works in Amsterdam.