Photography Double-Act shares tales of the trade with İstanbul audience

These are just some of the stunning pieces that feature in the extensive photography series of Vanessa Winship and George Georgiou, a married couple from Britain who have photographed extensively in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Turkey for the last decade, living and working in Serbia, Greece and Turkey.

Having lived in İstanbul for five years between 2003 and 2008, the award-winning pair were back in town this week to deliver a seminar and photo display to a packed audience of aspiring photographers at the fifth +1T Design Days, an annual week of events providing a dynamic platform for students to meet local and international media experts, hosted by Turkey’s Zaman daily at the paper’s headquarters in Yenibosna.

Having met 27 years ago during their student years studying photography at the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster College), Winship and Georgiou made their first trip to İstanbul on a student inter-railing venture, “At the time İstanbul was the furthest you could travel on an inter-rail ticket,” Georgiou explained to his young audience, “so we set off together but we would never have imagined at that stage that we would end up living there and how intrinsically involved and attached we would become with Turkey.”

Although the couple’s projects are not joint works, they are underpinned by the same interest in the Balkan countries and the Black Sea region and thus the pair always travel together, supporting, criticizing and editing each other’s works to compliment each other and make their relationship work in a way that many other couples bound in the same profession or job ultimately fail to do.

Having left British soil on a whim over 10 years ago, the couple found themselves inextricably drawn to the wartorn landscape of Kosovo and Serbia. It was here, Georgiou explained in an interview with Sunday’s Zaman, that he began to cultivate his interest in making longer series and projects, focusing on transition and identity with people’s negotiation of space to produce “Between the Lines,” a poignant two-part black and white series documenting the post-cease-fire period between 1999 and 2002. At the time Winship was working on her two-part series “Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey 1 and 2,” and “Black Sea between Chronicle and Fiction 1 and 2,” capturing with painful precision the confusion, emptiness and overwhelming sense of loss prevalent in the Balkan region at the time.

Winship explained to Sunday’s Zaman that she sees her work very much as a digital storyteller. Having always been interested in people’s histories, memories and stories and how these are mingled and intertwined regions, she manages to incorporate this storytelling into her series with a captivating, poetic voice commentary on her slideshows. Reflecting upon a photo of a white car trapped in motion passing through a grey ghost town, she comments in her gentle, almost haunting tones that “even a car that crept through the streets seemed to have no one in it,” noting on another image of an elegant, expressionless child that “although the girl radiated the luminosity of her youth, the weight of her place had already set her expression.”

Georgiou’s works are similarly powerful, highlighting less obvious effects of the conflict with painful precision. One such example, “Hidden: Psychiatric Hospitals,” presents a three-year project where Georgiou followed the plight of the patients of three psychiatric hospitals. Having worked with those with similar conditions in London, Georgiou recalls that he was shocked at the state of provision for such patients in Kosovo and Serbia, where he discovered the filthy conditions, lack of rehabilitation and poor staffing to be a far cry to contemporary practice in London. Despite his initial despair, however, Georgiou explained that by 2002 when he was wrapping up the project, money had been raised through public campaigning and with the help of a number of NGOs conditions had improved, adding that as his project progressed it became clear to him that the patients from all ethnic backgrounds were able to display more care for each other than their “sane” countrymen were displaying to each other on the outside.

When the couple moved to Turkey in 2003, both artists undertook changes in the style and direction of their works. Speaking to the seminar audience Winship explained that she had gradually become dissatisfied with the invisibility she had been able to effortlessly adopt using a standard 35 mm camera, reflecting that she wanted a more direct relationship with her subjects. She thus adopted a clunky large format camera, moving seamlessly into the realm of portrait photography which would allow her subjects the opportunity to compose themselves.

Winship’s award winning 2007 project, “Sweet Nothings: Rural Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia,” which was published as a book in 2008, was part of a effort to encourage more schooling for girls in rural areas, “One enduring image that had always struck me wherever I travelled was the schoolgirls in their little blue dresses, the same in every town, city or village all across the borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia,” she explained.

“The land is harsh and the lives of the small girls who inhabit it is just as harsh, so I wanted to make a series of portraits of these girls on the borderlands and to give them a set space and a moment of importance in front of a camera. I decided to use a slower, formal way of making the pictures to create this space. Every frame was made at the same distance to ensure a kind of equality to each girl.”

The irony, however, Winship reflected, was that as opposed to making the girls all look the same, the equal frame distance and identical clothing, on the contrary highlighted the girls individualism in their mesmerizing variety of expressions, poses and reaction to the portrait experience. Upon the Turkish move, Georgiou, although keen to continue his “Between the Lines” work, focusing on ethnic similarities across divides, wanted to move away from conflict, thus was born “Fault Lines: Turkey East West,” a project seeking to address and question the concept of East and West and the process of modernization, urbanization and national identity taking place in Turkey against a rising tide of nationalism and religion.

Having continued his use of black and white photography in İstanbul with an award-winning series of photos documenting the terrorist bomb attacks in İstanbul shortly after the couple’s arrival in the capital in November 2003, Georgiou decided using color in Turkey was a better approach, producing a stunning array of photos shot all over Turkey mostly in the winter, where the bold colors of apartment blocks, signs and children’s clothing stand out vividly upon grey skies and misty landscapes. With the project having now been published as a book, Georgiou chose mostly to represent the changes between East and West and rural and urban environments by focusing on the subtleties of ordinary everyday life that most people in Turkey experience.

Although the couple no longer lives in Turkey, they visit regularly. “We feel this inextricable bond with the place, the people are so relaxed and they have this easiness which you don’t get everywhere,” Vanessa reflected, adding: “The young people have a naivety and a sweetness about them, and it never ceased to surprise us how easy communication could be without language. It is surprising, for example, how many people will invite you to sit down for a cup of tea even though they know that conversation will be difficult. People in Turkey have a great desire to communicate, and that is a rare and valuable thing.”

To embark upon a Balkan journey of discovery, browse the artists’ projects past and present at www.vanessawinship.com and www.georgegeorgiou.net.