In the 1970s Bertien van Manen (1935–2024) photographed female labour migrants, and the wives of labour migrants who came to the Netherlands through family reunification. She portrayed Turkish, Moroccan, Tunisian, Spanish, Yugoslavian, Portuguese, Greek and Italian women at home, at work, at parties and in leisure activities, often struggling to survive in a foreign culture. These photographs resulted in her first book, Vrouwen te Gast, published in 1979. The project drew inspiration from the hope, expressed in the introduction to A Seventh Man, for a separate book about the experiences of female guest workers, and the original work was also a plea for action from the women’s movement in general and from the women’s secretariat of the Dutch Trade Union Federation (FNV) in particular.

In 2024 Van Manen revisited her own photographs and texts to make a new, more contemporary edit of that first work. For I am the only woman there she added newly discovered photographs from her archive and edited texts, together with a new text by Kim Knoppers. Her approach was formal and distant, showing living conditions that were often primitive.

Fw:Books publishes the English edition: 160 pages, hardcover, 17 by 24 centimetres, with texts by Van Manen and Knoppers. Van Manen is the photographer credited for the book. The new edition gathers photographs made in the 1970s and reopens that early body of work for contemporary readers, with an updated selection from the photographer’s archive and new accompanying texts.

The distance between the first publication in 1979 and this selection in 2024 changes the context in which the pictures are read. Bringing early records, the photographer’s own writing and later commentary together invites a question: how do photographs of migration, work and family life continue to address readers when they return to public view?