Visiting Speaker

Vanessa Winship

Winship moved to London in 1984 to study photography at the Polytechnic of Central London, where she met Georgiou, who is also an accomplished photographer.

She recalls her first encounter with photography as a young girl, rooting through boxes of family photographs at her grandmother’s house. “The reality of seeing a photograph that I was told was my grandmother at 14, and knowing there had been a life before she was an old lady, it was both baffling and intriguing,” she says.

Vanessa was fascinated by the fact that Albania was so little-known, despite being right in the middle of Europe, and when the Kosovo War began in 1998 and the conflicts began to spark media interest, felt it was finally the right time to go. From 1999, Winship and Georgiou spent a decade living in Athens, Belgrade, and Turkey, and working in the surrounding regions.

Winship’s projects Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey (1999-2003) and Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction (2002-2006) investigated notions of periphery and edge in Eastern Europe via images of rituals, pastimes, and landscapes, documenting the relationship between the people and the land without any overt acknowledgement of the geopolitical events overtaking them.

She also questions the idea of the periphery, though, pointing out that what seems like the edge to one person is the centre to anyone who is in it.

Tracing the borders from California to Virginia, and from New Mexico to Montana, she asked questions about location and identity. “Geographically speaking, we as human beings have created borders,”.

And then there are the borders of consciousness and unconsciousness,life and death, and of being a child or an adult – the latter something she explored in 2007 in Sweet Nothings, a series of portraits of school girls from Turkey’s eastern borderlands.

The photographs are shot in a consistent style but they manage to highlight each of the girls as individuals – despite the fact that they are unified by many things, including their history, their position in society, and the fact that they are little girls from a rural place.

Her current project And Time Folds. Features over 150 photographs including previously unseen projects and archival material; it also includes her newest series, a mixture of “completely different, random formats” and found objects, inspired by her granddaughter and “how she frames herself in the world in relation to seeing, hearing and touching”.

The series combines her usual medium of black-and-white film with digital colour photographs taken on her husband George Georgiou’s camera, as well as her own smartphone. The project relates to cycles in time and going backwards and forwards, while still being in the present. “This is the paradox of photography – it captures the now, which is immediately then of the past.”