I returned recently from teaching a workshop at ISSP a photography summer school in Latvia.


This is its fourth year. I can't praise enough the dedication and commitment of the people behind the organization, who are : Baiba Tetere, Jūlija Berkoviča, Arnis Āboliņš, Egils Grasmanis, thanks for finding me!
Other tutors were Eiko Grimberg (Germany), Mehmet Kismet (Turkey), Peeter Linnap (Estonia) Iveta Vaivode (Latvia) & Alexander Gronsky (Russia).
I knew Mehmet from Turkey, but it was great to meet with another group of photographers whose work I was unfamiliar with.
From top to bottom Peeter Linnap, Alexander Gronsky, Iveta Vaivode, Eiko Grimbergand Mehmet Kismet. ( all images copyrighted to the artists)
I'll be posting some images from some of the participants in the coming days.

Coming up really soon.
I was lucky enough to meet with Naoko Ohto who is the main curator of GALLERY 21 at Klee Inc. earlier this spring who invited me to show some images at this years TOKYO PHOTO which opens tomorrow.
THe image on the left is by Japanese Yuki Onodera (copyrighted to the artist).

September also sees the opening of Sweet Nothings, my first solo show in Holland at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, from the 19th through to January 17 2010

             awake too 
                                early,but...    
                                yesterday I was writing
                                some texts for Georgia

http://www.wordle.net/.

idea not mine
but stolen from
JC 
                 

Always a bit slow in posting, but thanks once more Joerg Colberg-

http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/01/review_sweet_nothings_by_vanes.html#more

Review: Sweet Nothings by Vanessa Winship

I could be entirely wrong, but I think that as the photography book market has expanded, so have photography books themselves. This, in part, reflects the fact that the photographs in those books typically tend to come in very large sizes.

But just like a photograph tends to have a natural size (beyond which a lot of its impact will simply dissipate), something similar might actually be the case for photography books (or maybe even more so): After all, unlike a photograph, which is typically viewed from a distance, one needs to hold a photography book to look at it. Some books are so big and/or heavy that you need to put them on a table - if not for the weight, then to create enough of a distance that you can actually take in the photographs.

So photography books are not even just objects that we interact with in some way, they also determine how we perceive their contents, and I think that part of the thinking about how to present a body of photography in a book needs to address what the book should feel like (form follows feeling?).

Vanessa Winship's Sweet Nothings can serve as a wonderful example of what I just talked about. Presenting her photography of rural schoolgirls from the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia (Turkey), Sweet Nothings wonderfully enhances Vanessa's portraits of those young girls, and it creates a little bit of a bond between the viewer and the work. I'm a bit hesitant to call this bond intimacy, because this word could so easily be misconstrued, but it might just be the right word. It's what Hellen van Meene tried to explain in our conversation, after I had asked her about her print size: "I think it's better for some photos to have this kind of intimacy, when you have to look at it getting closer. [...] With a small photo, I always spend more time with it, because I don't want to miss anything."

In that sense, you can spend a lot of time with Sweet Nothings, and you will then start to notice all the little hints of the different personalities in the portraits of those rural schoolgirls, who, when viewed superficially, look so similar.

Given I missed the book in my list of Best Photo Books 2008, it will be on this year's for sure.

I was in Georgia when this was originally published by the British Journal of Photography in the September..thanks Simon Bainbridge.

book reviews

Thanks to both Liz Jobey in the Guardian on the 18th of Dec, and Joerg Colberg in Conscientious on 22rd of Dec for their commentaries about "Sweet Nothings", much appreciated.