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07 june 2024, Flor Linckens

In Memoriam: the unpolished humanity of Bertien van Manen (1935-2024)

Bertien van Manen, Sled in Siberia

With great sadness and respect, we commemorate Bertien van Manen, the influential Dutch photographer and pioneer who passed away on 26 May 2024 in Amsterdam, at the age of 89. She was celebrated worldwide for her intimate, honest and detailed portraits of ordinary people, providing profound insights into the lives of individuals from various cultures, often during times of political upheaval. But she would always focus on the individual in front of her.

Van Manen was a storyteller who captured the beauty and complexity of human existence. Her photographs are distinguished by the sincere and personal connection she established with her subjects. She would often spend longer periods of time with them and would exchange letters and photos. Her intimate photographs reveal the people behind the stereotypes, highlighting the raw, unvarnished reality and humanity of her subjects. The photographer grew up in Heerlen, where her father worked as an engineer in a coal mine. The mines would fascinate her throughout her life.

Bertien van Manen, Siberia Nighttrain, 1992, Annet Gelink Gallery

Van Manen began her career as a photographer for the fashion magazines Viva and Avenue until a friend showed her the famous book "The Americans" by Robert Frank in 1975. Van Manen was immediately captivated by the unpolished portrayal of everyday life in post-war America and instantly decided to change careers. She starts out by shooting in black and white, a legacy of classic social documentary photography, but gradually begins to shoot in colour, making her personal style even more apparent. Her strength lies in revealing humanity, up close and personal. Capturing a raw, honest reality was more important to Van Manen than showing off technical feats. Instead of the professional cameras she previously used in the studio, she now preferred to use small, cheap, analog and fully automatic cameras that could fit into her pocket and drew little attention. This resulted in images that were sometimes grainy or overexposed, but Van Manen considered it more important to share the moment with us and saw it, in a way, as a metaphor for life.

Bertien van Manen, Nathan, Cumberland Kentucky, 1997, Annet Gelink Gallery

Van Manen travelled the world, capturing the lives of people in the Appalachians, Russia (and the former Soviet Union), Eastern Europe, the Sahara, Nicaragua, the United Kingdom and China. Russia particularly fascinated her, partly because she had relatives there on her grandfather's side. She spoke fluent Russian, making it easier to establish contact. In 1988, at the age of 46, she traveled with an English journalist to a mining village in Ukraine on assignment from a communist newspaper. Initially, she was unable to capture real families. When asked, she was presented with a slightly too polished family in folkloric attire and braids, surrounded by glossy ripe local produce. She felt this was not the raw reality of a poor, communist country and stopped a car on the street, requesting to be taken to a working-class neighborhood. However, people, oppressed by a controlling dictatorial regime, were initially hesitant to expose themselves to her. From 1989 onwards, Gorbachev's Perestroika policy provided more opportunities to experience Russian hospitality. As she got to know her subjects, she was often able to delve deep into their essence, resulting in informal and personal photographs. It was also a politically interesting period, a country amidst political change. This was also true for China, where she traveled fourteen times between 1997 and 2000, focusing on the increasing Western influence. During these travels, she sometimes found herself in potentially dangerous situations.

Bertien van Manen, Apanas - Felt Boots, 1993, Annet Gelink Gallery

Her “Moonshine” series covers a thirty-year relationship between the photographer and an American couple and their immediate environment. Living in a trailer in rural Kentucky near the Appalachians, Mavis and Junior are a tangible part of a large group of poor, white Americans from red states who feel unrepresented by metropolitan politics. They’ve often enjoyed little education, they live in trailers and they generally don’t benefit from economic growth or technological progress. At the same time, they are ridiculed and mocked as being 'hillbillies', 'rednecks' or 'trailer trash’, effectively reducing them to a caricature. Other people may call them ‘moonshiners’, a reference to the people who secretly make their own spirits. It's a landscape where populist politicians like Trump could take advantage of ignorance and deep-seated discontent — while he offered them a golden future and promised to fight for them. Instead, he only made rich people richer by offering them tax benefits. Van Manen truly showed her strength here, by showing us a series of intensely human portraits, reinforced by the fact that she recorded these people over a period of 28 years (1985 - 2013), while living with them for longer periods of time. That way, she got close to the skin and showed the people behind the caricatures.

Van Manen's work has been included in the collections of prestigious museums such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, SFMoMA, Huis Marseille, the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. She also published several photobooks. In the Netherlands, the (legacy of the) artist is represented by the Bertien van Manen Foundation and Annet Gelink Gallery.

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Flor Linckens

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07 june 2024, Flor Linckens

In Memoriam: the unpolished humanity of Bertien van Manen (1935-2024)

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