In December 1975, Bertien van Manen took a series of black-and-white photographs of daily life in metropolitan Hungary. Her subjects were commuters, grocers, chemists, café workers, and street vendors—people absorbed in the routines of a place before globalization had reshaped it. Many of those images had not been published before. I Will Be Wolf brings them together under the editorial direction of Stephen Gill, and it takes its title from “Grief” by the twentieth-century Hungarian poet József Attila.

Van Manen’s approach is close and unhurried. The photographs register ordinary encounters and the texture of urban life without turning their subjects into case studies. That restraint gives the work its particular tone: an ambivalent nostalgia rather than a sentimental return. The Hungary in these pictures is not a fixed historical illustration but a lived, unstable present, observed with curiosity and tact.

Published by MACK in 2017, the book is modest in extent—64 pages—but carefully made: a debossed flexi-bound hardback with a tipped-in image, measuring 20 by 23.8 centimeters. Gill’s editorial shaping matters. His sequencing draws connections among the photographs and lets the series read as a sustained body of work rather than a loose archive. The design holds the images at an intimate scale, appropriate to a project built from glancing, everyday proximity.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in the encounter it stages between the mid-1970s and the present. These photographs were made more than four decades before publication, and their appearance here in a considered edition makes a previously unseen body of work available. It is not a retrospective, and it does not claim to be. Its value is quieter: it restores a specific moment in 1970s Hungary, and it shows how editing can change what we see in images that have waited.