Bertien van Manen - Echoes of the Ordinary

Jul 4, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

The photographs of Bertien van Manen (1935–2024) are neither a private diary nor a family picture book. While some of the visual codes here might evoke aspects of either genre, the photographs meet none of the prerequisites. They are not about her, or about rituals, or about events, or about staged scenes. One might characterize her work as an intimate, subjective chronicle of the lives of ordinary people who, tossed about by the course of history that is written without them and that sometimes overwhelms and crushes them, try to get by, as best they can—and this is often far more heroic than one might think. A chance self-portrait shows us the photographer, a daring woman, tousled hair, sleeves rolled up: she looks proud, strong, rebellious, determined. A brief career as a model led Bertien van Manen to cross over to the other side of the lens and begin a life as a photographer, driven by a deep social engagement that took her across distant lands to reveal the social determinism shaping the communities she encountered.