Bertien van Manen, a Roving Photographer of Daily Life, Dies at 89
Bertien van Manen, a Dutch photographer who used point-and-shoot cameras to capture intimate images of daily life in China’s big cities and remote villages, the dismal apartments and alleyways of post-Soviet Russia and coal miners in Kentucky, died on May 26 in Amsterdam. She was 89.
Her studio manager, Iris Bergman, said the cause of her death, at a rehabilitation facility, was pneumonia.
Ms. van Manen was working as a fashion photographer in 1975 when a friend gave her a copy of “The Americans,” the groundbreaking collection of photos that the photographer Robert Frank took on a road trip across the United States in the 1950s.
“He wasn’t at all in the business of making beautiful photographs, yet that’s what they are,” Ms. van Manen told Aperture Magazine. “The coincidental, the inadvertent — I thought his photographs were magnificent.”
Ms. van Manen eventually traded the high-end cameras she used in fancy fashion studios for a 35-mm Olympus mju II, which retailed for less than $100 and was used primarily by consumers to capture vacations, birthday parties, graduations and the like.
