At the Guingamp Art Center: photographer Bertien van Manen, honorary adventurer

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Refugee women in the 1980s, the American working world, the Chinese countryside... The GwinZegal Art Center in Guingamp pays a precious tribute to three decades of the intimate and committed work of the Dutch photographer who died in 2024.

“Let’s Sit Down Before We Go” (1993). (Bertien van Manen/GwinZegal Art Center)

Being surprised by a very unique image, one that feels like it has never been seen so disturbing elsewhere: this is reassuring, in the midst of an era where our eyes are constantly solicited by a rapid flow of photos pouring onto our screens. This image, for us, is the one taken in black and white by Bertien van Manen , in 1987. We will remain observing it for a long time, thanks to the exhibition "Echoes of the Ordinary" dedicated to the Dutch photographer at the GwinZegal Art Center (Côtes-d'Armor). Four American toddlers, from the Appalachians, are sitting on the sofa of a mobile home. Wrapped in their bath towels, they stare at the photographer's lens. If the two located at each end of the sofa are clearly visible in the light, the two blond ones in the middle are struck by this clarity to the point of dissolving in the rays of the sun, as if doomed to an imminent disappearance, burning ectoplasms mocking the very nature of photography with its promises of eternity. We fear the absence to come.

Bertien van Manen – born in 1935 in The Hague, Netherlands, who died last year at the age of 89 –, throughout her life, privileged endless exploration, happy to travel until she knew no more.

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