Bertien van Manen

The title of Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen’s newest book of photographs, Let’s Sit Down Before We Go, refers to the Russian custom of pausing at home with family and friends before leaving on a trip. The images were taken during a series of visits van Manen made to former Soviet states in the 1990s and 2000s. Among the photographs on view is a group portrait of teenagers who wear only their underwear and ski boots as they sun themselves at the base of a snow-covered ski slope; a picture of a woman giving a man a haircut in a scene that evokes socialist realist farming landscapes; and an image of a neat row of prams parked against a wall.

The title of the series and the Russian custom it cites imply a temporal and geographic binary—before and after, home and away. Whether the photographs depict the reflective moments preceding departure to which the title refers or the journey that theoretically follows is left open. For van Manen, the images can be seen as souvenirs as they depict subjects inherently foreign to the Dutch photographer. And yet universal elements reverberate: Two women dress a bride; a young girl runs from the ocean. By collapsing the foreign and familiar, van Manen universalizes her subjects, creating a body of work that is at once partial and pluralistic.