Vanessa Winship Interviewed by Jem Poster

Internationally renowned photographer and first woman to win the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Award Vanessa Winship talks to poet and novelist Professor Jem Poster about her recent photographic monograph, Snow, and about her art and her strongly self-directed career. Snow includes a short story, Ice, written by Poster and interwoven with the photographs that inspired the narrative.

Snow grew out of a commission from a magazine to photograph Amish people in Ohio, United States. Winship felt she hadn’t got what the magazine needed and returned in the same season to try to find out what was disconcerting her. The result is a series of winter landscapes and a short section of images of Amish people with their horses.

Winship has worked on long-term projects in the Balkans and countries on the Black Sea alongside her husband and fellow photographer, George Georgiou. She is author of six photographic monographs and winner of many awards including two World Press Photo prizes and the Henri Cartier Bresson foundation prize. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Barbican Art gallery, in Sete, France, and in Cumbria. Poster is the festival’s director of academic programmes and emeritus professor of creative writing, Aberystwyth University. He is author of a collection of poetry, Brought to Light, and of two novels, Courting Shadows and Rifling Paradise.