Bertien van Manen – I am the only woman there

Bertien van Manen (1935–2024) photographed in the 1970’s female labour migrants, and the wives of labour migrants, who came to the Netherlands in the context of family reunification. She portrayed Turkish, Moroccan, Tunisian, Spanish, Yugoslavian and Italian women, at home, work, parties, and leisure activities, often struggling to survive in a foreign culture. This 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.