“Easter and Oak Trees,” the earliest work of the Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen, is more like a family album than a formal book of photography. The project unveils a collection of previously unpublished photographs—a rich and intimate record of unguarded familial moments captured by a young mother and nascent photographer.
Van Manen did not yet consider herself a professional photographer when she took the images during family vacations in den Eikenhorst, a region of the Netherlands whose name means “nest of oak trees,” in the nineteen-seventies. Her children frolic about the countryside, uninhibited, often nude, smoking fake cigarettes (made from kitchen herbs), and drinking out of beer bottles filled with water—a bohemian family portrait that van Manen recognizes would raise eyebrows if made in today’s politically correct culture.
The project was suggested by van Manen’s son, the subject of many of the images, when van Manen was asked, in 2011, to contribute to the Unseen Photo Fair, in Amsterdam. Together, the family set about culling her archive for the photos that would become “Easter and Oak Trees.” Blue dots and handwritten marks suggest van Manen’s editing of the images, many of them contact prints that bear the dust marks and scratches of a quick test print. Not originally intended for public exhibition, they possess the looseness and spontaneity that would eventually become the hallmark of van Manen’s oeuvre.
“Easter and Oak Trees” is published by Mack Books, and is also available as an e-book.
