American beauty: Vanessa Winship's photos of still, small-town US life.
The headline of the article is "American beauty: Vanessa Winship's photos of still, small-town US life". The author of the article is Sean O'Hagan The article was published on the web site www.guardian.com on Monday 27 May 2013. The article provides the information when I first wrote about Vanessa Winship in 2011, she had just become the first woman to win the Henri Cartier-Bresson award since its inception in 1988. Her new book, She Dances on Jackson, is the end result of a number of road trips she made across the States, funded by the €30,000 grant from the Cartier-Bresson foundation. It is a thing of still beauty that gives a glimpse of another America, both quotidian and luminous.
In the beginning of the article the author states the first image sets the tone: an almost stationary river with concentric ripples at its centre, where a fish could just have broken the surface to catch a fly. Beyond the river lies a reeded bank, a row of dark trees and a sky as grey as the water. The stillness is palpable, yet you can almost hear the echo of a soft splash. Another image shows a flock of birds in flight around a leafless tree, as if they have been startled by the shutter click of her camera. Again, the silence of the image is somehow amplified by the suggestion of sound.
The he states Winship's photographs are all about suggestion. What emerges cumulatively is an America of the imagination: her own imagination, of course, plus the received traces of other photographers who traversed the continent before her: the inevitable Walker Evans and Robert Frank– she actually sought out a site in Montana that Frank photographed in The Americans – but also the more localised work of William Eggleston, as well as Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi.
The author reports in three consecutive road trips, Winship roamed the US, though she chose to caption none of the images. This works for me, though, because the profound sense of place would be lessened by specific information about locales. Instead, we are left with their melancholy visual poetry. You sense someone drifting over America letting her eye rest on whatever fascinates her, even if she may not know why until later. Winship spoke recently of how her father's death in December 2011 loomed over the project. The sad stillness that comes off these images may well be, in part, her own.
In the very end of the article the author believes that "Very early you come to the realisation that nothing will ever take you away from yourself," muses Frank Bascombe, the restless, grieving narrator of Richard Ford's great American novel The Sportswriter. "But in these literal and anonymous cities of the nation, your Milwaukees, your St Louises, your Seattles, your Detroits, even your New Jerseys, something hopeful and unexpected can take place …" In She Dances on Jackson, you can sense the desire for something unexpected to emerge from the stillness.
In my opinion the photos are rather fine and worth seeing inspite the fact the are black and white, I mean not color.
The headline of the article is "American beauty: Vanessa Winship's photos of still, small-town US life". The author of the article is Sean O'Hagan The article was published on the web site www.guardian.com on Monday 27 May 2013. The article provides the information when I first wrote about Vanessa Winship in 2011, she had just become the first woman to win the Henri Cartier-Bresson award since its inception in 1988. Her new book, She Dances on Jackson, is the end result of a number of road trips she made across the States, funded by the €30,000 grant from the Cartier-Bresson foundation. It is a thing of still beauty that gives a glimpse of another America, both quotidian and luminous.
In the beginning of the article the author states the first image sets the tone: an almost stationary river with concentric ripples at its centre, where a fish could just have broken the surface to catch a fly. Beyond the river lies a reeded bank, a row of dark trees and a sky as grey as the water. The stillness is palpable, yet you can almost hear the echo of a soft splash. Another image shows a flock of birds in flight around a leafless tree, as if they have been startled by the shutter click of her camera. Again, the silence of the image is somehow amplified by the suggestion of sound.
The he states Winship's photographs are all about suggestion. What emerges cumulatively is an America of the imagination: her own imagination, of course, plus the received traces of other photographers who traversed the continent before her: the inevitable Walker Evans and Robert Frank– she actually sought out a site in Montana that Frank photographed in The Americans – but also the more localised work of William Eggleston, as well as Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi.
The author reports in three consecutive road trips, Winship roamed the US, though she chose to caption none of the images. This works for me, though, because the profound sense of place would be lessened by specific information about locales. Instead, we are left with their melancholy visual poetry. You sense someone drifting over America letting her eye rest on whatever fascinates her, even if she may not know why until later. Winship spoke recently of how her father's death in December 2011 loomed over the project. The sad stillness that comes off these images may well be, in part, her own.
In the very end of the article the author believes that "Very early you come to the realisation that nothing will ever take you away from yourself," muses Frank Bascombe, the restless, grieving narrator of Richard Ford's great American novel The Sportswriter. "But in these literal and anonymous cities of the nation, your Milwaukees, your St Louises, your Seattles, your Detroits, even your New Jerseys, something hopeful and unexpected can take place …" In She Dances on Jackson, you can sense the desire for something unexpected to emerge from the stillness.
In my opinion the photos are rather fine and worth seeing inspite the fact the are black and white, I mean not color.
Too short!
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