Vanessa Winship: Guest Lecture
Bath School Of Art And Design has been lucky enough to secure Vanessa Winship as a participant in this years list of visiting speakers. Perhaps one of the most prestigious and hyped up Photographer we've had at the University, the lecture theatre was almost full of students from a range of courses around the Art School. Photographer George Georgieu; Vanessa's husband also attended the event alongside her.
Vanessa's talk focussed primarily on her project "She Dances On Jackson" I've included a synopsis if you don't already know about the project;
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.
Vanessa's talk was fairly humbling, being such a highly rated photographer I came to the talk expecting a pretentious speech about her work and how great it is. Winship was actually quite a shy individual who read us some stories about the details of the trip and some insight behind the project and the images it included.
Winship took the photographs she dances on Jackson across 18 states in the US between autumn 2011 and winter 2012 setting out to unravel the myth of the American Dream, the road in search of empathetic small-town and counters probing ideas of race and class in the process. Photographing landscapes and staging arresting portraits of the people she met, pursued the truth of the contemporary American condition through the act of taking pictures.  |
| Perhaps one of the most iconic portraits featured in 'She Dances On Jackson" |
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