Landscapes, people, a sensitive black and white, without effect, vibrant with subtle grays, the feeling that spaces are inhabited, that they contain memories, traces, that man, without that being obvious, has modeled and inhabited, that’s what we feel in Vanessa Winship’s special approach. As usual, she does not describe, she testifies to nothing but what she feels, she does not try to demonstrate anything but wants us to share the emotions that assail her when she lets herself go to the measure of the space she comes across. Nothing excessive, a lot of restraint, perhaps even a little sadness, or at least melancholy, in this discovery that always finds the right distance to things, signs, people she met and tamed with sweetness. An attentive, generous look, served by precise and never forced frames, which breathe as if carried by the wind which accompanied the photographer towards the suppleness of the grasses, the textures of the walls, the beaches, the vegetation or the wavelets which trap the gray light. in search, in fact, of what discreetly keeps track of a time when one lived here of fishing, wine, salt.
The woman who was – and remains – the only woman to have received a grant from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation naturally found her rhythm in the marine scenery of the city and its surroundings. It is indeed the first time that the residence opens to the contours of the pond of Thau and the lagoon.
Christian Caujolle, curator
SÈTE #19 / Vanessa Winship
June 27 – July 27, 2019
Maison de l’Image Documentaire – CéTàVOIR
17 rue Lacan
34200 Sète
www.la-mid.fr
