A monograph by Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen.
Van Manen studied French and German literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands. While raising two young children, she worked as a translator, a French teacher, and a model. At the age of forty, she began her career as one of the few female fashion photographers in Amsterdam at the time. After encountering Robert Frank’s landmark documentary photobook The Americans (1958), she shifted her focus to documentary photography. Working as a photojournalist for a Dutch publisher, she travelled extensively across Europe, Asia, and the United States, producing bodies of work in diverse cultural contexts.
This volume brings together works produced up to 2021, alongside diary excerpts and a carefully selected group of previously unpublished archival materials, offering a broad overview of van Manen’s practice. Designed by Dutch graphic designer Hans Gremmen, founder of the independent publisher Fw:Books, the book articulates with clarity the artist’s distinctive historical perspective and trajectory, resulting in her first comprehensive monograph.