Vanessa Winship

biography

Vanessa Winship studied film before teaching photography in London. She joined Agence VU’ in 2005 and began long-term projects in the Balkans with her husband, the photographer Georges Gerogiou. She prefers black and white and portrait format, bare and frontal. She became known for her series on Anatolian schoolgirls in uniform, published in the book Sweet Nothings. Far from the watered-down clichés associated with childhood, she rigorously and systematically frames little girls who pose seriously, with serious eyes, in their classrooms or in front of mountainous landscapes.

In 2011, she begins a trip to the United States that leads to the publication of the book She Dances on Jackson, whose title refers to a missed photograph, the description of a scene she was unable to capture. Portraits, landscapes and urban views follow one another to form a poetic and melancholic vision of the country, made of details and interstices.

She is the winner of the HCB Prize awarded by the Fondation Cartier-Bresson for her work “Là-bas, une odyssée américaine” which presents a reflection on America and the concepts of borders, territories, history and memory. This prize allows her to complete her series and to be exhibited in 2013 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The first retrospective of his work will be presented in 2014 at the MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid.

Series

Sete#19, 2019

Serie | Landscapes, people, a sensitive black and white, without effect, vibrating with subtle greys, the feeling that spaces are inhabited, that they contain memories, traces, that man, without it being obvious, has shaped and inhabited them...

She Dances on Jackson, 2013

Serie | For more than a year, Vanessa Winship has traveled across the United States, from California to Virginia, from New Mexico to Montana, in pursuit of the mirage of the "American Dream".

Vanessa Winship séries

Georgia Seeds Carried by the Wind, 2009

Serie | When I returned in 2008, after a summer of war with its powerful neighbor. I found my friends exhausted but alive in a way that is only possible when one is so close to death.

Vanessa Winship séries

Black Sea, Between Chronicle and Fiction, Imagined States and Desires, A Balkan Journey, Part 3, 2008

Serie | On eight occasions, the British photographer Vanessa Winship visited the shores of the Black Sea.

Vanessa Winship séries

Black Sea, Between Chronicle and Fiction, Part 2, 2008

Serie | For several months she photographed exclusively in black and white the six coastal countries of Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia.

Vanessa Winship séries

Black Sea, Between Chronicle and Fiction, Part1, 2007

Serie | On eight occasions, the British photographer Vanessa Winship visited the shores of the Black Sea.

Vanessa Winship séries

Sweet Nothings, 2007

Serie | These dresses with their lace collars and sweet messages embroidered on the bodices, were the symbol of the Turkish state, but the girls who wore them were simply little girls...

Vanessa Winship séries