She started her career as a fashion photographer, after having studied French and German languages and literature.
She had her first exhibition in The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1977 and since then her work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur.
[1] She started her photography career in 1974 as a fashion photographer after studying French language and literature at the University of Leiden.
Inspired by Robert Frank's book The Americans (1958), van Manen switched from fashion photography to a more documentary approach, she travelled around, photographing what she saw.
She worked on commission and for long running projects, such as A Hundred Summers, A Hundred Winters (1991) about the post-Soviet states, East Wind, West Wind (2001) about China, Give me your Image (2006) about Europe,[2] Moonshine (2014) with photographs of mining families in the Appalachian Mountains,[3] and Beyond Maps and Atlases (2016) from Ireland.