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Vanessa Winship, Sweet Nothings, Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia
'A profound sense of place' … Vanessa Winship, Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia, 2007.
'A profound sense of place' … Vanessa Winship, Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia, 2007.

Vanessa Winship: the great, unsung chronicler of the world's outsiders

This article is more than 9 years old
From Mississippi to the Black Sea, Winship's poetic, masterful photographs show how hard it is for people to belong ... so why don't British galleries acknowledge her as this large Madrid retrospective does? She deserves it

"My work explores concepts of borders, land, memory, desire, identity and history," wrote Vanessa Winship in 2011. That hinterland is hard for any photographer to negotiate, as images cannot hope to carry the metaphorical weight of enigmatic writing such as that of the genre-defying WG Sebald. But what photography can do – as Winship's images prove – is capture a profound sense of place and show the problems of belonging and the melancholy of exile.

Vanessa Winship, Balkan Journey 1999-2002
From Balkan Journey 1999-2002. Photograph: Vanessa Winship

Winship has acknowledged the influence of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré on what she calls her "journey of investigation" through Albania, Serbia, Kosovo and Greece, from 1999 to 2003. Her series, Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey, is the first work you see on entering her retrospective at the new Fundación Mapfre gallery in Madrid. It deals with history and its aftermath: bleak or ravaged landscapes, people who seem lost and adrift. In the very first image, a boy shyly smiles through the glass of a cafe window at Winship's camera. This could be a cute photograph, but on closer inspection, you can see the reflections of the photographer and her uniformed minder. As metaphors go, it is rich, layered and understated. As such, it is indicative of Winship's approach, which grows more fluid as the retrospective unfolds.

Vanessa Winship, Black Sea 2006
From Black Sea 2006. Photograph: Vanessa Winship/Agence VU

She is a thoughtful photographer who moves surefootedly between genres – reportage, documentary, portraiture, landscape. Her most memorable images are quiet and luminous. Moving among the myriad communities that border the Black Sea and have fought over their territories and borders, she makes pictures like small dramas. Here, too, it is the children that often catch the eye, most notably in her shot of a boy and girl lost in concentration on a quayside, each staring off towards the horizon. In another, a tall, dark-haired woman walks along a train platform, carrying bags and trailing a child. His mother's eyes are on him, while he looks back at another child leaning out of the train. It has the appearance of a still from a film about another time and place.

Transience is a recurring theme. She photographs train stations, piers, ports, ferries, motorways and abandoned buildings that speak of older histories, conflicts, and occupations.

Vanessa Winship: Georgia: Seeds Carried by the Wind
Vanessa Winship: Georgia: Seeds Carried by the Wind Photograph: Vanessa Winship

Something happens to Winship's work in her third series, Georgia: Seeds Carried By the Wind, a poetic shift echoed in the subtitle. The landscapes become more mysterious and unplaceable – a dense cluster of thin trees sprouting from a steep bank, branches filled with birds and seed pods – while the portraits are more powerful even as the faces become more unreadable. Young men and women stand still, hands by their sides, as if entranced or awed by her camera. A young girl with cloudy eyes looks as otherworldly as anyone in a Diane Arbus portrait, but the gaze here is tender rather than cruel. One woman in a headscarf looks right through the camera at the viewer, while another holds it at arm's length with a suspicious, slightly nervous gaze that is echoed later in Winship's more recent American series, She Dances on Jackson.

Vanessa Winship She Dances on Jackson
From Vanessa Winship's She Dances on Jackson, 2013. Photograph: ooh

It is these portraits, plus the equally tender shots of East Anatolian schoolgirls from her series Sweet Nothings, that led to Winship's reputation as a perceptive contemporary portraitist. But her imagination is too restless for such easy categorisation. In She Dances on Jackson, she followed the paths of masters such as Robert Frank and William Eggleston, capturing an uncertain America that here and there has the sense of interior dislocation she encountered in the Baltics and the Black Sea. Here, though, people seem exiled in their own country by lack of prospects, the politics of parochialism and a deep suspicion of the other.

Vanessa Winship She Dances on Jackson, 2013
From She Dances on Jackson, 2013. Photograph: Vanessa Winship/Mack

She Dances on Jackson, made after she won the Henri Cartier-Bresson award, also includes personal written meditations. It is her most poetic and most melancholy, even sombre, series, defined by her grief at the death of her father. In this exhibition, it is linked to another sombre landscape series – made about the Humber estuary, where she was born and raised, before she travelled to America.

Vanessa Winship, Almeria 2014
From Almería, 2014. Photograph: Vanessa Winship

In my opinion, either of these series would have been the best place to end this retrospective. Instead, it culminates with another series on the parched Spanish region of Almería, made specifically for this show. For the single image of a small mountain of grey plastic sheeting, knotted and coiled like shrouds against a pale sky, it is worth seeing, but it does feel an afterthought in a show as thoughtful and beautifully realised as this. One wonders when a British gallery will acknowledge her in a similar way.

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