I went to Georgia for the first time in 2003, not long after the Rose Revolution. I didn’t go because of the revolution as such, but that was the context I found myself in. I was on a journey, a personal journey, a dialogue with photography and story telling. Georgia, like so many places with a sense of an ancient past, was a place that seemed to be in love with its own idea of self. It is a place where people comfortably celebrate the lush beauty of the land. The density and texture of the forests and mountains at first sight, transport you to a reality that might have been created by some alchemists brew. It is the same with the features of people who occupy this place. Faces...

I had been living and working in the region for almost a decade, and in Turkey itself for more than four years. I was drawn by ideas of borders and belonging. 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. These dresses with their lace collars and sweet messages embroidered on the bodices, were the symbol of the Turkish state, but the girls who wore them were simply little girls. In the borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia the dresses were still the same. The land is harsh and unforgiving, the mountains are high and cold. Life is difficult here, and the lives of the...

The Black Sea is bordered by six countries; Romania and Bulgaria to the west, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia to the north and east and Turkey to the south. Five rivers flow to the Black Sea. Along these river courses, the Danube, the Dneister, the Dnieper, the Don, and the Kuban have flowed a succession of nomadic cultures. Named Pontus Exinus ("the inhospitable sea"), the Black Sea was navigated and its shores colonized by the Greeks as early as the eighth century before Christ and later by the Romans in the third to first centuries B.C. From the Crusades and the Ottomans to the recent collapse of the Soviet Union, the Black Sea has witnessed often-tumultuous religious and political change....

Shiite Muslim girls mourning for Al Hussein on the sacred Shiite ceremony of mourning, Ashura. Ashura marks the Shiite Muslim's commemoration of the 7th century killing of their most revered Saint Imam Hussein. Al Hussein was a grandson of Islam's prophet Mohammed and is a symbol of martyrdom for Shiites.

Vanessa Winship ends her journey in Eastern States with a work in which the subjectivity is assumed. What interested her here, is to fix what is, for her, the aesthetic of the former soviet strongholds. A form of post-USSR Slavic culture, still marked by the communism codes and symbols...in the eyes of the Westerners. Such assumed approach is more interesting because it send us back to our own imaginary world, and to its outdated side: imagined lands and desires.

Vanessa Winship continues her tour in the former soviet states. The epoch has marked the state’s culture, and the photographer hasn’t got any problem to find the traces of this time...or, maybe does she track down it? The usage of black and white seems to fix scenes in a bygone past, and if the work was not dated, we would swear sometimes that it was produced 20 years earlier. Like things could endure all this time in our eyes.

A former USSR state, Georgia carries on its shoulder a terrible burden: to have being a communism test country. The state has never recovered its economy since the empire fall. But, for Georgian people, it’s a matter of life, go further without looking back. Vanessa Winship goes to meet them, and comes back with pictures in which black and white shades remains modest. What is photographed here is enough to testify that the life is hard, the way Winship photographs never tries to reinforce this matter of fact.