BEYOND THE IMAGE: BERTIEN VAN MANEN & FRIENDS

Next spring, the Stedelijk Museum pays a unique tribute to an icon of documentary photography, the Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen (The Hague, 1942). Although her work has been collected for decades by museums like the Stedelijk, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Metropolitan Museum Tokyo, this will be the first major survey of her oeuvre in the world. In close liaison with Van Manen, the exhibition will combine each of her series with the work of another photographer, fourteen in total, including Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov and Rineke Dijkstra. This provides a counterpoint to Van Manen’s work, granting a broader context, emphasis, contrast or counterbalance.

BERTIEN VAN MANEN
Bertien van Manen started her career as a fashion photographer, but Robert Frank's photo book The Americans (1958) inspired her to concentrate on her own projects, taking a spontaneous, unforced approach. She made lengthy, repeated trips to the Appalachians in the US, the former Soviet Union and China. The collection of the Stedelijk Museum holds over 80 photos from various projects, including the generous donation that Van Manen made in 2013 from her series Lets Sit Down Before We Go, Give Me Your Image and Vrouwen te Gast.

Van Manen's work is rooted in classic (social) photo reportage in serious of straightforward black and white which, up until the 1980s, was an important genre. Gradually, she evolved a personal, poetic form of colour photography that reveals her enduring, highly personal relationships with her subjects. The common thread running through the exhibition is the various series that Van Manen has produced since the 1970s, from her autobiographical work and the first series in Budapest in the 1970s, the black and white series about female migrant workers and nuns in the 1980s, the stories about Russian and Chinese people coping with changes in society in the 1990s, her series documenting other people’s family photos at the start of this century, to the sensitive (landscape) photos taken after losing her husband in 2010.

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