Give me your Image

From 2002 to 2005, Bertien van Manen travelled throughout Europe visiting families and documenting their personal photographs, some selected from albums or hung on walls, and others hidden in less obvious places in their lives. She collected traces of war and suppression, of happiness and sadness, spanning a century of history in these recorded—and here re-recorded—encounters of human eyes, minds, and hearts. Beyond its basic appeal, the project seems to re-evaluate van Manen's earlier work—a more straightforward photojournalism career that includes One Hundred Summers, One Hundred Winters, about the population of the former Soviet Union, and East Wind West Wind, about the Chinese population—and to commemorate the print itself, in light of the ubiquity of new digital cameras and camera-equipped mobile phones, which make his work even rarer.