Not Only Rare Birds Sing, is the title selected by Vanessa Winship for her exhibition at the Gallery Vu until March 19. For the first time she is displaying works from « Sweet Nothings », (2007), « Georgia » (2009) and « Latvia » (2009). She considers this selection a synthesis of her recent work. « I lived for more than 10 years in the Balkans, Turkey, and Caucasia. My work focuses on how chronicles intersect with fiction, exploring the concepts of borders, territory, memory, desire, identity, and history. I am interested in history and how it is told, and notions of fringe and limits. For me, photography is a learning process, a journey towards understanding.”

The series’ presented here emphasize the photographer’s portrait technique (nearly all done with a mounted, large format camera), frontal and often intense or serious. There are many portraits of teenagers from the small Estonian town, school children in their uniforms or frail judokas. If the full frontal pose is reminiscent of August Sander’s aesthetic, her method is different. She documents, but also brings a poetic dimension, one that evokes memory, especially in her series “Georgia”.

She is convinced that “photography is perhaps the most accurate vision of memory.” Fo the past ten years, this work about passing time, territories and their identities has received many awards including the most prestigious “World Press Photo”, the “Sony World Photography Award”… the series “Sweet Nothings” was published by “Images en Manoeuvres” in 2008.

First Vu’ workshops with Vanessa Winship

During this exhibition, Vanessa Winship will hold two workshop sessions, from February 4-6 and from March 4 – 6, 2011. They are the first workshops organized by the gallery. Entitled “Environmental Portraits”, they will be held in the VU’s Hôtel Paul Delaroche. They will include photo shoots in the neighborhood, readings and editing of resulting pictures.

VU’ La Galerie
Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue St Lazare
75009 Paris
BernardPerrine@Le-Photographe.net