Book Review: “Snow” by Vanessa Winship
By Kelly Lee Webeck | October 6, 2022
Published by Deadbeat Club in 2022
7.5" x 9.85" / 104 pages / Tritone & 4 Color Offset / Soft Cover / Text by Jem Poster
Snow is a slow ramble through a midwestern landscape as captured by Vanessa Winship. The landscapes are quiet and peaceful but they are also cold and isolated, evoking a sense of loneliness. Filled with gray and misty atmospheres, Snow’s landscapes are full of secrets. What drew Winship to these landscapes? What did she see in those fields that kept her returning during the cold, barren winters? The scenes are recognizable yet ambiguous. While nothing in the photographs points to a specific location on a map, there are elements tucked within each image that tell us of where we are situated. What are we looking at? Empty earth holding lone structures; a drilling rig, vacant billboards, broken fences, windswept rural architecture. There is something weird about the place, something curious and captivating.
The first images are audibly cold. Were you to step into them, you would feel the crunch of the snow beneath your feet, the wind whipping around you. Black and white images are interspersed with color ones. It takes a moment to recognize this because the hues are subdued and the tones desaturated. They work both ways, each sharp with their chill. The images make me shiver.
There is always distance between the photographer and the place she is capturing. She is an outsider, watching and never getting close. Until this point the landscapes are void of people, but we see hints at life. Bicycles strewn on the ground. An empty swing. Is Winship showing us loneliness? A sense of isolation?
A new type of paper marks a transition in the book. The paper becomes lighter, thinner and warmer. Here we see the first photographs of life; a horse drawn buggy canters along the road, a figure is cycling into the distance. As a photographer, Winship is well known for her intimate portraits. It is therefore interesting that when people are photographed here, distance is maintained. The people, like the landscapes, remain far off. Even while photographing the interior of a livestock auction, she seems apart. She is photographing a crowd but not the individuals. She is an observer, she is not involved.
The publication contains a fictitious story written by Jem Poster. While a female photographer narrates the story, this protagonist is not our image maker. Poster used Winship’s images as inspiration to create a narrative. This is a story about loneliness and a story of chasing the light. After reading the story we realize the scenes look more familiar and show what is to come, the unwritten ending. Together with the images, the collaboration represents two types of fiction. While Winship may have photographed real places, the images, when they come together with the text, exist somewhere between truth and fiction. Photography, too, can be fictitious. Perhaps the landscapes I read as lonely or the swings I see as empty are that way because the people are inside their cozy home, with family and friends.
Since 2005 Vanessa Winship is a member of Agence VU. After leaving Britain in 1998 she worked in long term projects in the Balkans and countries surrounding the Black Sea along with her husband, photographer George Georgiou. She is the author and subject of six photographic monographs, Schwarzes Meer (Mareverlag GmbH 2007), Sweet Nothings (Foto8/Images En Manœuvres 2008), she dances on Jackson (MACK/HCB 2013), Vanessa Winship (Fundación MAPFRE 2014), And Time Folds (MACK/Barbican 2018) Sète#19 (Le Bec en L’air / Images Singulières 2019) and a box set, Seeing the Light of Day (B-Sides Box Sets 2020)
Snow is available from Deadbeat Club Press.