Centre de la Photographie de Mougins

Echoes of the Ordinary

Bertien van Manen

From July 4 to October 4

Curators : Jérôme Sother, François Cheval, Yasmine Chemali and Iris Bergman

The photographs of Bertien van Manen (1935-2024) are neither a private diary nor a family picture book. While some of the visual codes here might evoke aspects of either genre, the photographs meet none of the prerequisites. They are not about her, or about rituals, or about events, or about staged scenes. They correspond neither to the conventions of spectacle nor to the commonplaces of photojournalism; historical and political events are absent from the center of these images. One might characterize her work as an intimate, subjective chronicle of the lives of ordinary people who, tossed about by the course of history that is written without them and that sometimes overwhelms and crushes them, try to get by, as best they can – and this is often far more heroic than one might think.

 

This exhibition presents, for the first time in France, a profoundly feminist and committed artist. As a spectacle of ordinary and humble lives, Bertien van Manen’s photography, far from the pull of sensationalism and dominant narratives, builds a remarkable documentary oeuvre carried by her empathy with each instant: the chronicles of disorder.

 

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Adress: Centre de la photographie de Mougins 43, rue de l’Église 06250 Mougins