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| | village voice > art > Bertien van Manen: Family Jewels: Visual Relics of Europe's Past by Leslie Camhi |
 | | But van Manen, an accomplished documentarian who has produced book-length photographic essays on societies in transition, including post-Soviet Russia and contemporary China, looked beneath the surface of the banlieues, with their evident social problems. |
 | | She was interested in the visual relics of home that these migrants had borne with them, the people and lands they'd left behind surviving in a kind of semi-imaginary afterlife. |
 | | This is not the work of a young photographer, though there's something almost grab-baggy about van Manen's casual framing in color of what are often formal, fl-and-white studio portraits, her layering of kitsch figurines, coal miners, and Moroccan wedding couples, as if to suggest that we are living today through the ruins of history. |
| www.villagevoice.com /art/0604,camhi,71872,13.html (990 words) |
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