I will be wolf

Abstract

In December 1975 Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen made a series of black-and-white photographs capturing daily life in metropolitan Hungary, which was then under Soviet occupation. 'I will be Wolf' brings together many of these beautiful and never-before-seen images with the editorial direction of renowned British photographer Stephen Gill. Her snapshots of commuters, grocers, chemists, café workers, and street vendors contain all the hallmarks of a bygone era, before the grip of globalisation was able to make its mark on the Soviet Bloc. Imbued with an air of ambivalent nostalgia, the book takes its title from a line in the poem Grief by the 20th century Hungarian poet József Attila.