Bertien van Manen

Bertien van Manen was a Dutch photographer. She was born in 1935 and passed away in 2024.

She started out as a fashion photographer — and she still has an eye for detail and pattern — but inspired by Robert Frank's book "The Americans" (1958), she decided on a more documentary approach. For a time she photographed in black-and-white, but she changed her style radically in the early 1990s. From that point on, she travelled with great regularity through Eastern Europe and Asia.

Her many travels and intensive contact with the people she met resulted in the book "A Hundred Summers, a Hundred Winters" in 1994. A logical follow-up was "East Wind West Wind" (2001), which was shot in China. In 2005 Van Manen published "Give Me Your Image", comprised of photos of interiors in which the residents had placed a private photo of their own. "Let's Sit Down Before We Go" (2010) is less documentary than her earlier books and therefore allows more room for the viewers' imagination. Her book "Beyond Maps and Atlases", made after the death of her husband in 2010, is a search for an answer. In 2021, MACK published an overview of work to date, including diary entries, in "Archive".

Her work is included in major international collections such as Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris) and The Metropolitan Museum of Photographie (Tokyo).

Bertien van Manen lived and worked in Amsterdam.