Bertien van Manen — I am the only woman there

Bertien van Manen (1935-2024) photographed in the 1970’s female labor migrants, and the wives of labor migrants, who came to the Netherlands in the context of family reunification. She portrayed Turkish, Moroccan, Tunisian, Spanish, Yugoslavian, Portugese, Greek and Italian women. At home, work, parties and leisure activities, often struggling to survive in a foreign culture. These photographs resulted in her first book ‘Vrouwen te Gast’, published in 1979. In 2024 Bertien revisited her own photographs and texts to make a new, more contemporary, edit of her first work. For ‘I am the only woman there’ she updated the book with new discovered photographs from her archive and new texts, by herself and Kim Knoppers.

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