Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra's photographic series Beach Portraits (taken primarily between 1992 and 1996) comprises images of individual, pairs or groups of young people posing in swimming outfits on beaches in the United States, Poland, England, the Ukraine, Gabon and Croatia. Subjects are photographed full length on a small stretch of sand or pebbles, the water line horizon at thigh or waist height, the sky a wider band of grey or blue. The subjects’ gaze is directly to the camera and the camera angle low, enabling a ‘monumental, confrontational’ format (Visser, in Dijkstra 2004: 8). Dijskra's images depict puberty as a time of awkwardness, when nothing seems to fit: clothes are not right, limbs are too long and skinny, skin is sore, swimming costumes are baggy. Standing calmly if sometimes quite tentatively in front of flat seas, the young people seem resigned to waiting for something better – for the sun to come out, to finish this posing, or to grow a different body.

In his introductory essay to a book of Dijkstra's photographs, Hripsime Visser quotes the Freudian analogy that adolescents are like crabs waiting to grow their shells. Crabs at this developmental stage hide under rocks until the new shell has hardened,

because if it is wounded in this defenceless stage it will bear the scars for life. The comparison with the way in which Rineke Dijkstra – who herself grew up in a neighbourhood by the sea – has hauled her ‘shell-less’ adolescents from their hiding places in order to display them in their vulnerable nakedness is seductive. The presence of the sea in these early images is, in this respect, of course remarkable. (Visser, in Dijkstra 1999: 9)

Although the crab analogy is compelling, Visser's use of ‘hauled’ seems unnecessarily negative. Whilst I agree that the photographs articulate vulnerability, I find them more compassionate. For me, Dijkstra figures a patience and resignation in young people that is compelling and admirable; the young people wear their vulnerability with grace and strength.