Bertien van Manen (1935-2024) photographed in the 1970’s female labor migrants, and the wives of labor migrants, who came to the Netherlands in the context of family reunification. She portrayed Turkish, Moroccan, Tunisian, Spanish, Yugoslavian, Portugese, Greek and Italian women. At home, work, parties and leisure activities, often struggling to survive in a foreign culture. These photographs resulted in her first book ‘Vrouwen te Gast’, published in 1979. In 2024 Bertien revisited her own photographs and texts to make a new, more contemporary, edit of her first work. For ‘I am the only woman there’ she updated the book with new discovered photographs from her archive and new texts, by herself and Kim Knoppers.

Bertien van Manen grew up in Heerlen, the centre of the eastern part of the former Dutch coal mining region, where her father worked as an engineer for the State Mines. This publication brings together photographs Bertien van Manen made in different mining towns: Wakefield and New Sharlston, Yorkshire (UK, 1970s), Most (CZ, 1980s), the Appalachian Mountains (US, 1980-1990s), and Apanas, Siberia (RU, 1990s).

Since the 1970s, Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen has created intimate and poignant photographs of commonplace scenes, produced during extended trips to Europe, America, China and the former Soviet Union. Van Manen has established herself as a unique voice in documentary photography, her visual language imbued with empathy and respect for the everyday lives of her subjects. This book presents an extensive overview of Van Manen’s work, alongside diary entries and previously unpublished selections from her archive.

The book has been edited and designed by renowned Dutch designer Hans Gremmen to offer a unique insight and overview of Van Manen’s history, establishing this publication as the ultimate reference work on her oeuvre.

In December 1975 Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen made a series of black-and-white photographs capturing daily life in metropolitan Hungary. I will be Wolf brings together many of these beautiful and never-before-seen images with the editorial direction of renowned British photographer Stephen Gill. Her snapshots of commuters, grocers, chemists, café workers, and street vendors contain all the hallmarks of a bygone era, before the grip of globalisation was able to make its mark on the country. Imbued with an air of ambivalent nostalgia, the book takes its title from the poem Grief by the 20th century Hungarian poet József Attila.

Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into

And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?

Seamus Heaney from the poem ‘Herbal’ in ‘Human Chain’

At first, working in Ireland I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. My husband had died.
I dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere. I was guided by a
feeling and a search, a longing for some kind of meaning in a place of myths and legends. There was mystery and endlessness at the edge of a land beyond which is nothing
but a vast expanse.

Bertien van Manen
Amsterdam, September 15th 2015

'...Van Manen’s point and shoot style of photography is one of allowing imperfections in technique stand. In many of her images there is often an unearthly quality to the light; for instance the unnatural glow of the girls’ back in the book’s cover image as she runs from the camera; in an early black-and-white image of four children sitting on a sofa, the two girls in the center dissolve in the glow of the window light; fiery light leaks stain an image of a man in a coffin at a funeral.

...It is said that in the distilling of ‘moonshine’ whisky, the clearer the liquid looks the more powerful the alcohol. In Bertien van Manen’s Moonshine the opposite may be true, imperfection handled with a fierce respect and admiration has allowed for a stronger more powerful drink than few have been able to produce...’

Jeffrey Ladd
TimeLightBox

‘...It wasn’t until I spent some time with the work that it really began resonating with me. I see my own life and family in many of these photographs.’

Roger May
Appalachian photographer

‘....It is surprising to see how in essence all the qualities of her riper work are present in these family-snapshots: the lyrical looseness, the sensuality and the melancholy but also a feeling for balance and composition. They seem free, sturdy improvisations on themes, which later, in ‘A Hundred Summers a Hundred Winters’ or in ‘East Wind West Wind’ more outspokenly took shape. Of course especially the contactprints thanks to their grafic imperfections have the seductive aura of authenticity but much more interestitng is the search for form, however spontanuous and intimate the scenes may be. This is most explicitely visible in the attention for the pose. In a single case this is purposefully being created but more often it is very precisely being seen and captured in all its artless liveliness and almost painfull beauty.’

Hripsimé Visser

The photos in this book have been made between 1991 and 2009 in Russia, Moldova, Kazachstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tatarstan, Georgia. The editing and sequencing of the images have been done by Stephen Gill.

The title of these series, ‘Lets’s sit down before we go’, is a metaphor for the subject of the images. An old habit in Russia. Before leaving for a long journey, people sit down for a moment and think about where they will be going and why...

Bertien van Manen has travelled through countless countries in Europe to photograph photographs. She had to enter dwellings and souls, and also the dwellings of souls and the souls of the dwellings. This was a study of interior photography -if by ’interior’ one means something more than simply the inside of a room- say, the inner essence, the core of human being.

Yuri Andrukhovych

‘...To penetrate the privacy of other people’s lives would take a great deal of tact anywhere. For a Dutch photographer to have found her way into the intimate corners of Chinese lives must have taken more than that. China, for all its hospitality, can be an intensely private place.
It is traditionally a country of walled cities, walled palaces, walled gardens, and walled family compounds. The family is still the basic unit that dominates most Chinese lives.

And Bertien van Manen has penetrated those units, to show us how Chinese live, eat, touch, talk, and sleep in private. To have done this she must have been not only tactful, put persistant, curious and symphathetic. You can tell from her photographs that she was trusted. Even if she never sees them again, you feel that her subjects are her friends.

Bertien van Manen’s pictures do not have an overtly political message. She is an artist, not an activist. But the political history of China is visible in almost every photograph...’

Ian Buruma

‘...Through her excellent photographs and her inquiring and humanistic temperament, and with powerfull artistic expression, Bertien van Manen shows what historians, writers, sociologists and political scientists argue, that there exist at least two Russias. There is the official, imperial and external Russia, known to us from newspaper headlines, and the one within, the hidden, poor Russia of the anonymous, ordinary people of whose existence Bertien van Manen’s moving and revealing album tells.’

Ryszard Kapuscinski