Bertien van Manen | at Foundation Bertien van Manen: Tokyo Revisited

Bertien van Manen Foundation is opening its doors for a pop-up exhibition organised in collaboration with Annet Gelink Gallery. The exhibition brings together a selection of photographs taken during Van Manens stay in Tokyo in 1996. Marking their debut in the Netherlands, these photographs occupy a rare space within the artist’s archive. 

Over a three-week period, Van Manen moved through the Japanese metropolis, her lens focused on the everyday lives of its youth. Rather than viewing the city from a distance, she sought out proximity: capturing the fleeting glances, postures, and gestures that existed in the liminal space between the mundane and the deeply personal. Her raw, unpolished visual style captured a generation in the 1990s. Not as a topographic portrait of a city, but rather as a collection of intimate encounters. Initially exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, this series is brought to light once more, marking its first public reemergence in thirty years. 

Stichting Bertien van Manen

Koningsveldestraat 14

3037 VS, Rotterdam

Bertien van Manen (1942, Den Haag) lived and worked in Amsterdam. As a photographer, Van Manen got incredibly close to her subjects. She immersed herself in the places and cultures she photographed by learning the language, living alongside the people whose lives she documented, and building lasting relationships. To keep her presence natural and unintimidating, she preferred to use small cameras. “People felt less threatened by it,” she said. “You are a guest who happens to take photos, rather than a photographer who is a guest amongs us.” Over her career, she documented nuns, female migrant workers, mining communities in Appalachia, and daily life in China and the former Soviet Union. She published ten books featuring her work, including A Hundred Summers, A Hundred Winters (1994), East Wind West Wind (2001), Let’s Sit Down Before We Go (2011), Moonshine (2014), and Archive (2021).