East Wind West Wind

Bertien van Manen
East Wind West Wind

Photographs: Bertien van Manen

Text: Ian Buruma

Publisher: De Verbeelding publishing

232 pages

Year: 2001

Comments: Softcover with acetate dust jacket, 258 x 200 mm. First edition, 2001. Text in english and in chinese. In very good condition.

"Bertien van Manen is a reporter of intimacy. To penetrate the privacy of other people’s lives would take a great deal of tact anywhere. For a Dutch photographer to have found her way into the intimate corners of Chinese lives must have taken more than that. China, for all its hospitality, can be an intensely private place. It is traditionally a country of walled cities, walled palaces, walled gardens, and walled family compounds. The family is still the basic unit that dominates most Chinese lives. And Bertien van Manen has penetrated those units, to show us how Chinese live, eat, touch, talk, and sleep in private. To have done this she must have been not only tactful, put persistant, curious and symphathetic. You can tell from her photographs that she was trusted. Even if she never sees them again, you feel that her subjects are her friends."

Ian Buruma