Vanesa Winship

VANESSA WINSHIP (United Kingdom, 1960).
“Hakkari,” Sweet Nothing Series, 2007.
Pigment on ultra-thin matte museum-quality cotton rag paper. Edition 4/10.
Includes a label from the Juana de Aizpuru Gallery.
Measurements: 55 x 43 cm; 82 x 71 cm (frame).
Created in 2007, “Hakkari” is part of the Sweet Nothings series, one of the defining projects of Winship’s career and, without a doubt, the work that cemented her international recognition. The series was created over several years in rural schools in Eastern Anatolia, one of Turkey’s most remote and complex regions, marked by the coexistence of Kurdish, Turkish, and Armenian communities and by a long history of political and cultural tensions. Rather than making that context the explicit subject of her images, Winship directs our attention to what remains on the margins of the news: childhood, identity, and the process of constructing collective memory.
In this photograph, two girls are shown standing face-on, holding hands. The composition possesses an almost perfect symmetry reminiscent of the classical portrait tradition, while the bare background eliminates any anecdotal elements to focus all the intensity on the figures. Their identical dresses and the almost mirror-like repetition of their bodies evoke a sense of unity that is, however, broken by the subtle nuances in their expressions, postures, or hand gestures. Formally, the image encapsulates the main characteristics of Winship’s visual language. Black and white eliminates any immediate temporal reference and accentuates the portrait’s timeless quality. The Sweet Nothings series marked a turning point in contemporary photography precisely because of its ability to reconcile the documentary and the lyrical.
Vanessa Winship is one of the most prestigious documentary photographers of her generation. She studied Film and Photography at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster).Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, the FOAM Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, the National Media Museum in Bradford, and the Rencontres d’Arles, among others. She has also participated in numerous international exhibitions dedicated to contemporary photography.
Among the many accolades she has received are the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (2011), one of the most prestigious awards in international photography, and the distinction of being the first woman to receive the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Photography Prize. She has also won several World Press Photo Awards and prizes from the Sony World Photography Organization. Her photographs are part of major public and private collections, including those of the Tate (London), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris), the Mapfre Foundation (Madrid), the National Museum of Photography in Denmark, and various international collections specializing in contemporary photography.