This woman is a shit-hot photographer! This is great, great work! I couldn’t help yelping with excitement at some of her pictures. What an eye! What a fantastic eye for finding a good subject, for framing and composition! Each one packs a visual and aesthetic punch.
This is the first major UK solo exhibition of contemporary English photographer Vanessa Winship, who was born in 1960. The exhibition showcases over 150 photographs, along with magazines and diaries, extensive wall texts, experimental works and even audio tracks of Vanessa reading her own poetic prose to the accompaniment of hypnotically repetitive minimalist sounds.
Hand in hand with her photographic genius goes a fair dollop of pretentious curatorspeak and a variety of experiments which are interesting but, in my opinion, fail. But none of this detracts from the brilliance of loads and loads of the photos here.
Untitled from the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction, 2002 to 2006 © Vanessa Winship
Unknown pleasures
All the early photos in the exhibition are from photographic projects carried out in Eastern Europe, namely the Balkans, the area around the Black Sea, Turkey and Georgia.
This is a part of the world we almost never hear from. It has cultures and traditions we are completely unfamiliar with, languages none of us can speak (Albanian, Georgian). The people look different, they are from ethnic stock we are unfamiliar with. They dress differently, their ideas of casual, formal or traditional wear are from different worlds. Their histories, the sway of oriental empires over these lands, from the Sassanids onwards through to 20th century communism, have left the landscape and cities littered with statues to heroes we’ve never heard of and leaders whose grandiose visions have crumbled and collapsed.
Untitled from the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction, 2002 to 2006 © Vanessa Winship
The subjects, people and places are recognisably human, recognisably European, or at least Caucasian. They come from a recognisable twenty-first century – but it is not the twenty-first century we’re living in.
They are heirs to the colossal wars and dislocations of a twentieth century we can only read about, and to a blanket of totalitarian oppression we can’t really imagine, to centuries of peasant poverty, and they now live amid the crumbling concrete of the failed communist utopia.
Untitled from the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction, 2002 to 2006 © Vanessa Winship. ‘A choreographer of the state’s greatest dance company, the world at his feet, had gone on tour with his wife, a young and beautiful dancer. One night after a show a group had gone out to celebrate. They were strangers in that town and didn’t know the streets. A robbery occurred, his young wife had her jewellery snatched. There was a fight, and in the fray a terrible and fatal accident happened. He had fallen into a deep an impenetrable depression. No one knew what to do or how to console him.’
Discourse and obfuscation
Modern curators and art experts can run rings round us with the jargons of curatorspeak and political correctness, but often have a real problem describing the actual art – the stuff you see, the information the eye processes and transmits to the brain.
It is infinitely easier to write about issues, to invoke the language of sociology and the human sciences and a kind of water-down left-wing politics, to repeat at length the same old clichés of identity politics and political correctness, than it is to describe and explain the aesthetic thrill – what happens when we see and engage with the work.
So, for example, one of the many lengthy wall labels explains that Vanessa’s work is:
concerned with politics, identity, community, home, belonging, vulnerability and the body
which makes her sound the same as virtually every other contemporary artist alive today.
The exhibition includes quite a few of Vanessa’s own words and thoughts. For example, she tells us that her work explores the:
concepts of borders, land, memory, desire, identity and history
‘Identity’, ‘memory’, ‘desire’, ‘the body’, ‘history’, ‘community’, the absolute stock, standard, unchanging, entirely predictable themes of all contemporary art. It’s like a list of fillings at Subway, mind-numbingly obvious and predictable.
I imagine a bored sandwich shop worker asking ‘Now, do you want to interrogate traditional gender stereotypes in your roll, or would you rather explore contemporary notions of the body and desire on plain white? And would you like to engage with some lettuce and mayonnaise?’ These are the art critical clichés of our time.
The guide tells us that Vanessa attended art school in the 1980s where she was introduced to post-modern dialogues which radically questioned photography’s ‘truthfulness’ and ‘objectivity’. Surely you have to be a moron to think that photography is truthful or objective? I mean, really, really, really stupid not to know how photographs are tampered with, and cropped, and photoshopped and posed and generally invented and made up in a thousand ways? Always have been. Roger Fenton re-arranged the cannon balls in the Valley of Death at the Crimean War in 1855 to make them look more picturesque. 1855! Lying with cameras has been going on ever since photography was invented.
Is there anybody anywhere who doesn’t realise that?
But it’s easy to write biography, to list the academies an artist attended, the courses she did, the ‘issues’ she was introduced to. By contrast, nowhere is there a description of Winship’s fantastically acute visual perception and technical ability, her gift at framing, composing and capturing subjects to phenomenal effect. Because that is difficult.
The room of Black Sea photos, taken altogether, is one of the most powerful collections of photos I’ve ever seen.
Here are the people of a strange, remote region – the girls, the boys, the bored housewives, the police. Here are the men, unvarnished, foreign, inaccessible. Men from a completely different tradition and language, behaving, looking, talking from a completely different place than we’re used to.
Untitled from the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction, 2002 to 2006 © Vanessa Winship. ‘Comfortable in their victory, they were together as one. They seemed absorbed not only by the game, but also by echoes from their place in another time, when they were heroes.’
There’s a bunch of photos taken on board a fishing ship out in the Black Sea, bleak and cold and wind-wracked, the long nets trawling out from the rusted old equipment. It is an image of the world, the world of work, the work that billions of labouring people have to perform every day.
And yet the wall label tells us that Winship’s Black Sea series focuses on ‘the fragile nature of belonging and a plurality of truths and realities’.
Is that not a completely inadequate use of prose to even remotely capture the visionary precision, the solid realism of other worlds and other cultures which these rooms depict so marvellously? Does this photo depict ‘the fragile nature of belonging’? No. Lots, thousands of other things, yes, marvellously, yes.
Untitled from the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction, 2002 to 2006 © Vanessa Winship
The Humber
Bidding the East Europe rooms a reluctant farewell, we move on to discover that the second half of the show features a room of stunning photographs of the muddy estuary of the Humber river, near where Winship was born and grew up. She applies the same wonderful eye for composition, the same profound understanding of the power of black and white photography, to these empty windswept landscapes.
Untitled from the series Humber, 2010 © Vanessa Winship
The wall label points out that her photographs ‘trace the roots of the materiality of this place’. I can see what they mean about the sheer slappy quidditas of the mud which dominates these images but… it still seems inadequate to even touch on the power of the images.
Experiments
Many of the photos are accompanied by extended captions and quotations from literary works. Fair enough, but I found the texts added little or nothing to the pictures. Her photos are so far away in a different universe of brilliant that the fairly pedestrian text, for me, just can’t keep up.
In one of the rooms of Balkan photos some pleasant ambient muzak pulses repetitively while Vanessa herself intones some of her own prose poetry.
There’s a room devoted to a project recording Turkish girls in their school uniforms, Turkey having had – apparently – ‘gender equality issues’ for some time. Who knew?
There’s a set of straightforward although rather haunting portraits of schoolgirls in their school uniforms. But next to them was a sequence where photos had been made into collages of the official documents, id cards and birth and school certificates of the girls. Fine, and I can see the conceptual point – they’re just not a patch on the straight photos.
Later on there’s a series – And Time Folds – inspired by Winship’s little grand-daughter, which amounts to several wall-sized arrangements of sometimes overlapping photos of the English countryside – trees, railings, flowers and so on – with her grand-daughter popping up in some of them, looking through railings, snuffling through the grass in wellies, a little like Christopher Robin in the Pooh books.
And they’re in colour, which has a strangely jarring effect after looking at so many photos in black and white. The colour – to my mind – somehow brings out their banality, their everydayness.
Untitled from the series And Time Folds, 2014 and ongoing by Vanessa Winship © Vanessa Winship
How do you like them apples? They’re OK but… lack the punch of the Balkan works.
she dances on Jackson
The final room was disappointing. Instead of building up to something even more weird and unexpected, it turns out that Winship won the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson prize in 2011 (the first woman to do so, cheers, fireworks, streamers), and decided to spend the prize money to fund a journey and a photographic investigation of… America 😦
My heart sank. America. That obscure country which has been so little reported on… She still has a tremendous eye for character and composition, heavy men being a speciality, here as in the Balkans.
Untitled from the series she dances on Jackson, 2011 to 2012 © Vanessa Winship
But we have seen too many photos of rural and small town America. Winship discovers, like every other European who’s gone on artistic pilgrimage to small-town America, that the countryside is sparse, the small towns feel empty and listless with their rows of low-rise buildings and traffic lights hanging from wires, the streets are haunted by alienated skater youths and gawky listless teenagers, there are blacks hanging coolly on the corner, here’s a portrait of a smart young man dressed in his U.S. Army uniform – these may all have been new to Winship, and she captures them with trademark precision – but I feel like I’ve seen photos of them all, exactly these same subjects, hundreds of times before.
There is one really new and ‘experimental’ aspect to the and she dances on Jackson project, which is that Winship includes extensive samples of her diary entries and emails to friends, reverently shown in big display cases. These were, not to put too fine a word on it, trite and inconsequential.
I guess life itself is and can be deeply violent
she shares with a friend, in an email dated 7 November 2011, sent at 11:39, and addressed to ‘C’. (Every email includes the addresses, date and time of transmission.) Indeed, I think this is the first exhibition I’ve ever seen which features the artist’s emails as part of the display – and it is a dire warning to all other artists not to bother.
On 24 November 2011 Winship begins a diary entry with these words:
Walking down an empty street in Las Cruces we meet a young couple.
Turns out that the couple had hitch-hiked there, and, now she’s bumped into them, proceed to share some of their stories with lucky Vanessa who, in turn, has shared them with lucky us.
This is all, frankly, dull, unless you are a Vanessa Winship completist, in which case maybe you’ll want to collect all her emails, even the ones about the gas bill and the leaking gutter.
Summary
So some of the experiments – reading prose poetry over music, mixing coloured and different size prints in the And Time Folds sequence, and the inclusion of mundane emails and diary musings – do not, to my mind, succeed.
It doesn’t matter. Who cares? She can include her laundry list in her next exhibition if she wants to. Or a wall-high printout of her phone bill. Just as long as she keeps on taking such beautifully composed, wonderfully framed and arresting photos.
Untitled from the series Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey, 1999 to 2003 © Vanessa Winship. ‘It was a strange city, and seemed to have been cast up in a valley one winter’s night like some prehistoric creature. It was not easy to be a child in that place’ (Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone)
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