Posted on
2014-06-16
The photography of Vanessa Winship (born Barton-upon-Humber, 1960) establishes a dialogue with the mark left by the twentieth century on people and the places they have passed through: long processes defined by movements of fracture and integration, the instability of frontiers and the reaffirmation of identities. Her images, some of which are accompanied by short texts, offer a poetic gaze that is less immediate but longer lasting than that of photo-journalism, focusing on the effect of history on everyday life.
From the time she embarked on her project in the Balkans in the late 1990s up to her most recent work in Almería, Winship has focused on places in which human presence and the landscape seem to defy geo-political limits and historical events. All the potential and the documentary content of her photography thus shifts towards more intimate concepts such as vulnerability, the body and biography. Her series reveal the way in which physical features, clothing, customs, legacies, national and racial affiliations and governmental orders are inscribed on the skin. This is also the case with the way in which each unchanging landscape resists history or imprints on itself the wounds of a recent past through the ruined vestiges of political or social projects.
This dual nature, located between documentary research and personal investigation, is crucial to Winship’s work. Whether her images depict the immediacy of a moment that almost escapes the gaze or are based on a model posing, there is an element of authenticity, capable of generating a sentiment of what is common to all of us and shared through a gaze cast on the seemingly alien and distant.
Exhibition runs through to August 31st, 2014
Fundación Mapfre
Bárbara de Braganza Exhibition Hall
Calle Bárbara de Braganza, 13
28004 Madrid
Spain
www.exposicionesmapfrearte.com
