Kerry Kilburn Weekly Artist Post W 1/25/16

Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship is a British photographer who has worked extensively in Eastern Europe as well as the United States, focusing primarily on long-term projects that explore the links and interactions between people and landscapes (both natural and manmade).  She has won numerous awards, and is the first woman to win the Henri Cartier Bresson Award. Her work has been exhibited in galleries internationally and published in the form several books. The photos above are taken from she dances on Jackson, the 2013 culmination of a project described by the publisher as a pursuit of the American dream and "a conversation, a lyrical and lilting interaction between landscape and portrait exploring the vastness of the United States and attempting to understand the link between a territory and its inhabitants."

In her projects, Winship tends to alternate photographs of landscapes like the ones above - a combination of natural and manmade - with portraits of the people who live in them. She uses a large format camera, which, as she points out, means that, however formally her subjects are posed, at the moment the picture is taken her subjects are looking at her, not a camera lens. Thus, each portrait represents a moment of human interaction, not a moment of abstraction.

I find Winship's photographs compelling on several levels. By using black and white, she reduces her subjects to their simplest compositional elements of line, shape, and value. She can therefore create almost abstract images from concrete subjects, as she does with the photograph of the deer in the forest. Her portraits always feature subjects looking straight at her (and the camera) with relatively neutral expressions, but each expresses the subject's individuality. I think she accomplishes this, in part, by the way she places the subject in their environment and makes the two part of one another.
Finally, I love the way she refuses to idealize her landscapes. Some photographers (myself included, I'm sorry to say!) would want to find a way to photograph the farm at the top that expressed a sort of heroic view of the American farmer, rather than letting the viewer absorb the reality of the space and the lifestyle it encompasses.

For some good insights on Winship's work, see Chris Stone's essay on  her series "Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia." The Font of All Knowledge (Wikipedia) has a brief biography and discussion of her working methods, subject matter, and a summary of her exhibitions and publications - helpful as some of this information can't be found on her website linked above.