Give Me Your Image by Bertien van Manen

A photo book by Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen.

This work is an outgrowth of the series Paradise in a Box, which he created for a photo project for the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, depicting migrants in the suburbs of Paris. Van Manen took “photographs of photographs” in private homes in Lithuania, Greece, Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Bulgaria, Mordovia and the Netherlands. While van Manen has documented society through the intimacy and relationships between individuals, in this work he photographs his subjects keep with them, photographs that hang on their walls, photographs that migrants choose to take from their homes, and photographs that they choose to articulate their personal histories. Each photograph tells a personal story, and if you step back and look at the whole picture, you can see the broad history of Europe, from soldiers in the First World War to the concentration camps of the Holocaust, political demonstrations in Spain, and the last coal miners in England. In this work, van Manen explores the role that family photographs taken across Europe play in our lives, and how they shape our identities and our personal and shared histories.

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Title: Give Me Your Image
Artist: Bertien van Manen
Steidl, 2006
Hardcover, case binding
225 x 177 mm
144 pages
Text in English
First edition
ISBN: 9783865211989