MADRID.- Under Off Festival section of PHotoEspaña 2011, the British photographer Vanessa Winship, winner of Descubrimientos PHE Award 2010 (Discoveries PHE), shows her work Sweet Nothings in a solo exhibition at the Art bookstore and gallery Gloria.

Winship had been living and working in Turkey for several years. One enduring image that had always struck her was the schoolgirls in their blue dresses, the same in every town and village. These dresses with their lace collars and messages embroidered on the bodices, were the symbol of the Turkish state, but the girls who wore them were simply little girls. In the borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia, a region known euphemistically as the emergency zone because of a long low level conflict, in which many thousands lost their lives, the dresses were still the same. In this series of portraits Winship hoped the symbol of the uniform, the distance in repetition, and the austerity of the landscape would represent one thing. She also seeked the expressions of the girls faces to draw attention to the idea of these young girls poised at the moment “just before”. The moment where possibility lies, a time where the presentation of self, teeters into consciousness.

Winship participated in the portfolio review organized by PHotoEspaña 2010 in Madrid, which received the accreditation of 1.380 international emerging photographers. This award has offered to Winship the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at PHotoEspaña. The show will continue open until July 30th.

Vanessa Winship (1960, United Kingdom) lives in London and for years she has lived and worked at the Balkans, the Caucasus and Turkey. Nowadays she is represented by the Agency Vu. Licensed in Visual Arts for the University of Westminster, Winship has received prizes as the World Press Photo and has been nominated as photographer of the year by the Sony World Photography Iris D'Or. She has exposed her work in Arles Workshop, Host Gallery, The Photographers Gallery of London, the Museum Kunsthal of Rotterdam and the National Portrait Gallery of London. Winship has published two monographs: Sweet Nothings in 2008 and Schwarzes Meer (The Black Sea) in 2007. Her work develops ideas as the concepts of border, place, desire, identity, history, memory and how the stories and the identities are reported and expressed. Her imaginary one also explores the juxtaposition between the chronicle and the fiction.