#168 CAMERA Book Review: Vanessa Winship - She Dances on Jackson
A fascinating and quiet depiction of contemporary America in black & white through the eyes of Vanessa Winship in her book She Dances on Jackson.
*Please note that there is a small essay at the back of the book which gives some context to the images. If you want to read it then you should buy this lovely book.
In 2011 Vanessa Winship was the recipient of the Henri Cartier Bresson Award which funds an artist to pursue a new photographic project. For over a year Winship travelled across the United States, from California to Virginia, New Mexico to Montana, in pursuit of the fabled ‘American dream’. she dances on Jackson presents 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. For Winship this relationship is inextricable; places accrue particular meanings according to the people she meets, what she sees, and by what's happening to her personally. Each human encounter, sound and smell adds extra dimensions to her work and the resulting photographs.
She dances on Jackson marks a progression. Stylistically similar to her previous work using black and white film and a large-format camera, Winship’s portraits remain arresting and unnerving but this body of work reveals her to also be a skilled landscape photographer. For Winship photography is a process of literacy, a path by which she understands life. Her intimate approach enables the reader to glimpse the world as she sees it, if only for a moment.
Printed and embossed linen hardcover
144 pages, 64 tritone plates
24 x 27 cm
Publication date: June 2018
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 began a trip to the United States that led 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 “There, an American odyssey” 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.
Camera is on
Thank you for all your support.
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