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Schaden.com - Projects * Publishing * for International Contemporary Photography

 

Bertien van Manen
Give Me Your Image
HC 18 x 22 cm.
Steidl 2005

Bertien van Manen has crossed a large part of the world for her previous works, and now she has extensively travelled for her new work: these are personal pictures and family portraits from all over the europe, against an intimate backdrop.

"This is a study of interior photography" Yuri Andrukhovych -

'Bertien van Manen's photographs - rich, textured, from the hip - might be described as a sort of visual anthropology. But while that term gets at what she does - immersing herself in the communities she photographs and investigating visual manifestations of culture, namely photography itself - it's too academic and fusty to describe how her pictures look. A cross between Robert Frank and Nan Goldin with a little bit of Martin Parr, her pictures are deftly composed, with an intuitive sense of colour. At the same time they can feel casual, and almost accidental. Which is, of course, entirely intentional...
'Give Me Your Image' begins a conversation, through photographs, about photographs and their role in our daily lives.' Jean Dijkstra, Art Review -

"The current ubiquity of digital images, their endless proliferation
and dissemination, induces a kind of forgetting. The printed
photograph, van Manen reminds us, has a life of its own, aging the way our body does, precious because it's vulnerable. Van Manen has preserved the curious second life of these images, in a moment when they are threatened with extinction." Village Voice -

 


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