193 - Vanessa Winship / Christopher Anderson Sweet nothing / Sète #12 - 2008-2012

Vanessa Winship / Christopher Anderson Sweet nothing / Sète #12 - 2008-2012 During her long stay in Turkey, photographer Vanessa Winship became fascinated by the issues surrounding borders and belonging. While she became familiar with Turkish habits and customs far removed from her English habits, it's the schoolgirls in their little blue dresses that continue to fascinate her. Wherever she traveled in this country traumatized by guerrilla warfare, she came across these little girls. Although they have become symbols of the Turkish state, they are just little girls. To counter the region's traditional values of keeping girls at home, the government has launched a campaign to enable poorer families to send all their children to school. As a result, the number of girls attending school has slowly increased. Sweet Nothing is a series of portraits of these schoolgirls. While photographing them, the author was deeply moved by the mixture of gravity and fragility of her little models, but above all by their incredible naturalness. An emotion that the reader cannot ignore as he contemplates these magnificent images / A portrait of the town of Sète by photographer Christopher Anderson, who joined the VII agency in 2002, was nominated for a Magnum fellowship in 2005 and became a member in 2007; text by Christian Caujolle, color photos.