SNOW by Vanessa Winship

Deadbeat Club, 2022
7.5 × 9.85 in
104 pages
Tritone and four-color offset printing
Softcover

The origins of Vanessa Winship’s Snow lie in a commission (this from an artist who very rarely works on assignment, although Winship says she often approaches things “as if I have somehow been sent by someone”), but the photographer’s interest in what she found soon eclipsed anything that could properly be thought of as a “story.” Winship made repeated trips to a particular landscape—and, notably, a particular season—in order to fathom what it was that had disconcerted her in the initial making of these photographs.

While Winship (born 1960) is well known and highly regarded for her intimate portraits, in Snow a deliberate physical distance emerges—felt as much as seen—between Winship 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.

“Winter isn’t negative. We have to have winter. We have to have dormancy. We have to tighten our belts… I went back to Ohio alone, attempting to somehow comprehend this feeling I had about the landscape.” 

—Vanessa Winship