Bertienne van Manen, a Dutch photographer who used point-and-shoot cameras to capture intimate images of China’s big cities and remote villages, the gloomy apartments and alleys of post-Soviet Russia and the daily lives of coal miners in Kentucky, died in Amsterdam on May 26. She was 89.
His STUDIO Manager Iris Bergman said the cause of his death at the rehab center was pneumonia.
Ms. van Manen was working as a fashion photographer in 1975 when a friend gave her a copy. “American,” An incredible collection of photos by the photographer robert frank In the 1950s he took a road trip across the United States.
“He was not in the business of making pretty pictures at all, yet that is what he is,” Ms. van Manen said. told Aperture Magazine. “Coincidentally, unintentionally – I thought his photographs were brilliant.”
Ms. van Maanen eventually swapped the high-end cameras used in fancy fashion studios for 35-mm Olympus MJU IIWhich retailed for less than $100 and was primarily used by consumers to capture holidays, birthday parties, graduation ceremonies, etc.
The cameras’ size and simplicity allowed them to disappear into plain view. “People felt less threatened by them,” he told Aperture. “You’re more likely to be with a guest who also takes photos, than with a photographer who is your guest.”
The cheap cameras produced photos that were sometimes blurry and overexposed — flaws that Ms. van Manen did not correct in the darkroom. To her, they were stylized metaphors for the chaos of life.
“There’s a kind of spontaneous intimacy in her work,” said Suzanne Kismaric, the former curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where Ms. van Manen’s work is located. Work has been exhibited. “He did that very deliberately.”
“A Hundred Summers, a Hundred Winters” (1994) captured post-Soviet life “in the most inaccessible places – ordinary people’s homes – to show us how millions of Russians live and sleep, what they eat, what their everyday lives look like, in their flats, at their tables, in their beds,” the Polish journalist wrote. Ryszard Kapuściński It is written in the introduction.
In “East Wind West Wind” (2001), Ms. van Manen recorded life in China’s discos, all-night theaters, airport restaurants and rural villages, as well as places she visited during several trips to the country. In “Let’s Sit Down Before We Go” (2011), she collects photographs she took from 1991 to 2009 in Russia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tatarstan and Georgia.
Her only major work shot in the United States was “Moonshine” (2014). Ms. Van Maanen, the daughter of a coal-mining engineer, rented a pickup truck in 1985 and traveled alone across Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky in search of female coal miners.
“I had never traveled to the Appalachians before and was so impressed by the beautiful mountains there,” she said. wrote In The Guardian. “But I was not prepared for the human chaos. Occasionally, the miners had small houses, but mostly they were crammed into caravans, mobile homes or whatever they could build in the forest.”
In Cumberland, Kentucky, they met a coal miner named Mavis and her husband, Junior. Ms. van Maanen wrote in The Guardian that they shared a trailer, which housed “Mavis’s son Chris and Junior’s collection of 23 rifles.”
She stayed with them for four months, then returned several times.
One photo shows a child on a neighbor’s lap holding a gun. Other photos show Junior’s granddaughter applying eyeliner, his sister sitting in a rocking chair with her eyes closed and Mavis holding her dog.
“For some reason,” Ms. van Manen wrote “I was immediately welcomed,” he wrote in The Guardian. “The locals have a reputation for being aggressive, hard-drinking people, but I liked them. The rest of us wear masks and try to be nice, but they are what they are.”
Bertienne Henket was born on February 15, 1935 in The Hague. His father, Nicolas Henket, was an electrical engineer who worked in the coal mines. His mother, Erica (Baudouin) Henket, took care of the house.
While studying the French language at Leiden University, she worked as a model.
“I lost interest in it and thought I’d change things up. I’d be behind the camera instead of in front of it,” she told Aperture.
At a party she met fashion and advertising photographer Theo Noort, who hired her as his assistant. Later she began shooting photos for Dutch women’s magazines.
At that time, there were very few women fashion photographers.
“The models loved working with women instead of all those men,” Ms. van Manen told Aperture. “They felt free and didn’t feel like objects of desire. So I had a surprising amount of work.”
However, he found the work “hollow.”
When a friend gave her Mr. Frank’s book, she found it “so moving and so personal that I thought — this is the way I want to take pictures,” she said. told Art Review, 2005.
She married Willem van Manen in 1961. He died in 2008.
Ms. Van Manen is survived by her daughter, Willimine Van Manen; her son, Joris Van Manen; and a grandson.
Ms. Kismaric, the former MoMA curator, said Ms. van Manen’s style had been largely shunned in the world of art photography.
“A lot of the work now is already thought out, quite intellectual and less dependent on the photographic capability of the camera,” he said. “Bertien was very interested in making it clear to the viewer what it felt like to be in that place at that time.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
