Bertien van Manen :

Curators: Jérôme Sother, François Cheval, Yasmine Chemali

Opening Friday 3.07.2026, 18:30

The exhibition is organized with the Centre d’art GwinZegal, Guingamp and Stichting Bertien van Manen, Amsterdam. With the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. 

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. They correspond neither to the conventions of spectacle nor to the commonplaces of photojournalism; historical and political events are absent from the center of these images. 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 selfportrait 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 magazine photographer. And yet she quickly showed a social acuity and engagement by shooting several stories on migrant women – from Turkey, Morocco, and Yugoslavia – who had come to the Netherlands to work and to escape the determinism of their past conditions. It was in flipping through The Americans (1958), by Robert Frank, that Bertien van Manen had the sudden vision of the photographs she truly wanted to make and the world whose story she wanted to tell. Here was the distance and proximity in which her work would be rooted from now on. She no longer sought to illustrate the world, but to experience it, as close as possible to the people, things, and communities that fascinated her.

The daughter of a Dutch coal-mine engineer, she set out for the United States in 1985, bound for Appalachia to seek out women working in the mines. These coal workers lived in small houses, or sometimes piled in trailers, mobile homes, and makeshift shacks in the woods. Bertien van Manen set her professional photography equipment aside and took up a little amateur 35 mm camera. Goodbye magazine and fashion commissions: a new space of time opened the way to an intense intimacy, without artifice, which led her to participate in the life of this community for more than thirty years, over the course of many trips. Never cynical, her images oscillate between beauty and chaos; in them, one can follow the daily lives of these families through several generations, in their hardships and their laughter. She gives shape to a subjective documentary style that she would express more fully through books than through exhibitions. She also kept, from Robert Frank’s work, an insatiable thirst for journeys and encounters. “I never sleep so deeply as when I’m on the road, in an anonymous bed, in a strange place, where I wake up not knowing where I am, and thinking no one else knows either,” she wrote in her journal. It is no accident that beds, as a furnishing element, appear repeatedly throughout her work. This is the most private space of all, where the inner world unfolds in sleep, in dreams and embracings. Bertien van Manen was one of the first to slip past the Iron Curtain and document post-Soviet life in Russia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine, through dozens of trips between 1991 and 2009. She is not a street photographer; the relationships she weaves are more intimate: she brings us inside the apartments, into the kitchens, the living rooms, and the bedrooms, in the wee hours of night or morning.“I have to like the people I photograph,” she says. “I have to feel an attraction, a fascination.” This exhibition presents, for the first time in France, a profoundly feminist and committed artist. As a spectacle of ordinary and humble lives, Bertien van Manen’s photography, far from the pull of sensationalism and dominant narratives, builds a remarkable documentary oeuvre carried by her empathy with each instant: the chronicles of disorder.

© Bertien van Manen Works
Dorothy,West Virginia, 1987, 19,5 × 29,5 cm
From the series Moonshine. Baryta print
Courtesy of Stichting Bertien van Manen

© Bertien van Manen Works
Reportage by Jolanta Klein
and Bertien van Manen (1980), published in Vrij Nederland.
Untitled 1979-1980, 25 × 20 cm. Silver gelatin print
Courtesy of Stichting Bertien van Manen

© Bertien van Manen Works
Kazan, Vlada in the kitchen, 1993, 25 × 38 cm
From the series Let’s Sit Down Before We Go. C-print
Courtesy of Stichting Bertien van Manen

Public program

ISBN : 979-10-90698-60-4
Authors : François Cheval, Rosemarie Buikema, Jérôme Sother

Publishing: May 2026
Bilingual Français / Anglais
Traductions: Jennetta Petch, Cyril Béghin, Peter de Sinety
Editorial services: Elsa Hougue
Graphic design: Le Petit Didier

189 pages
29 €

On sale at the Mougins Center of Photography store.