Snow – Vanessa Winship

Winship is well known and highly regarded for her intimate portraits, but in Snow we experience a noticeable physical distance between the photographer and her subjects. What little the viewer can possibly grasp onto is the subtle repetition of the humblest elements of the earth. Collectively, the pictures come to embody the artist’s struggle to connect and to make sense of this place while ultimately acknowledging that she, like us all, is nothing but a stranger in this world.

This estrangement is echoed in a piece of fiction – by the poet and novelist Jem Poster – that’s woven through Snow. It tells of a female portrait photographer and her recalcitrant subject. But this character is not Winship, and the sitter is not someone in a Winship photograph. Poster’s is a fiction based on an imagistic construct – another beguiling layer in a complicated book that seeks always to expose the slipperiness of narrative and to destabilize easy readings.