The thread that links Bertien van Manen’s various works together is her portrayal of the seemingly small and undramatic moments of everyday life. The Dutch photographer’s images have the easy familiarity of snapshots, and whilst she started out photographing her own family, and has published a book of this work, she now achieves this sense of intimacy in images taken on long trips through Russia, China, and the Appalachian Mountains. Using time, intuition, and automatic cameras, she enters into her subjects’ lives, creating deceptively simple shots that pick out colour, pattern, and the unremarkable moments that make up the fabric of our lives.
It was a successful formula, and works such as ‘A Hundred Summers a Hundred Winters’, ‘East Wind West Wind’, and ‘Give Me Your Image’ were both beautiful and thought provoking, yet earthy and naturalistic. Her first body of work produced in Ireland, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, follows suit to a certain extent, with one notable exception; a sense of death and loss is an oblique presence. As such, in this body of work a focus on human life gave way to landscapes and nature.
The images depicted in Van Manen’s new book were shot on a series of trips to Ireland between 2013 and 2015, in the wake of her husband’s passing. Whilst travelling across the island, she used simple, analogue cameras, allowing her to shoot subjects and landscapes spontaneously. In her opinion, this results in a less intimidating atmosphere for the people she photographs, and thus creates a more natural snapshot. Van Manen has previously stated that she doesn’t enjoy digital photography as the aspect of surprise plays such an important role in her work, not only for her subjects, but also for herself.
“At first, working in Ireland I wasn’t sure what I was looking for”, she says. “My husband had died. I dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere. I was guided by a feeling and a search, a longing for some kind of meaning in a place of myths and legends.”
Van Manen’s sense of loss manifests itself throughout this collection, and perhaps the photos say more about her grieving state of mind than they do about the environment she finds herself in. A sense of mournful emptiness is portrayed through ghostly landscapes shrouded by fog, solitary figures engulfed by vast horizons, and in particular the rolling waves of the Atlantic crashing against the coast, perhaps representative of the expansive emptiness that lies beyond our Western coastline.
“I started out with no idea of what I was doing,” she says, “but slowly images of people gave way to images of nature as the work became more and more imbued with a kind of mystical feeling that is hard to describe. There is so much water in Ireland – the rain, of course, but lakes and rivers and this vast sea that surrounds it. In retrospect, I can see that perhaps I was looking for the mystery in this big nothing that lies beyond the edge of the land.”
Van Manen’s travels around Ireland were guided not only by the other photographers, friends, and strangers that accompanied her, but also by the words of some of our greatest writers. The title of this collection, Beyond Maps and Atlases was a phrase coined by Seamus Heaney in his work “A Herbal”, a poem which contrasts the eternal self-renewal of Nature with the mortality of mankind. Van Manen’s collection is presented with no accompanying information, in order to allow the viewer to bring in their own imagination and interpretation. Yet one can’t help but feel that her sentiment is remarkably similar to Heaney’s; as the waves continually crash against the coast, humanity will always be subject to change and loss.
The Beyond Maps and Atlases collection is eerily beautiful and hauntingly unique, offering a fresh perspective on the so oft photographed landscapes of Ireland. Enigmatic and unconventional, taken together the photos produce an otherworldly aura, and it is most certainly worthwhile taking the time to enjoy them.
Bertien Van Manen’s Beyond Maps and Atlases will be on display from 15th January to 19th March, at Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast.
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