a hundred summers, a hundred winters by Bertien Van Manen

*Signed first edition*

‘Luda welcomes us with open arms on the veranda under the dripping trees. ‘A hundred summers, a hundred winters,’ she cries, hugging me tight, for we haven’t seen each other for a long time.’

A book of photographs taken throughout the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 90s. In contrast to many portrayals of the collapsing empire presented to the western world at the time, these belong to the intimacies and loneliness of the moments they capture. van Manen’s accompanying diary details the hospitality she received, the warmth and food provided for her, and delicately touches on the reality of who these persons are to themselves and to each other amidst the decay of social and ideological structures. She attains a language at once elegiac and constitutive of surviving and emergent kinships.

Softcover, very good condition. 1994.