Sweet Nothings, made by Vanessa Winship in 2007 across Eastern Anatolia, Turkey, portrays state-school girls living in towns and villages near the country's borders.
The project grew from Winship's extended residence in Turkey and her interest in borders and belonging. She repeatedly encountered the same blue, lace-collared school dresses, whose embroidered messages and standardized form linked their wearers to the Turkish state. Yet the girls' presence complicated the uniformity those dresses suggested. Photographed as Turkey was expanding a national campaign to address unequal access to primary education, the series examines girlhood, schooling, identity, and the relationship between individual expression and institutional classification. Winship described the sitters as occupying a moment "just before," when future possibilities remained open, rather than presenting their circumstances as predetermined.
The black-and-white photographs show girls standing alone, in pairs, or in small groups, often beside sisters or friends they selected themselves. Winship used full-length, frontal compositions and maintained the same camera distance for every portrait, a structure she intended to establish equality among the sitters. Most look directly into the lens. Against sparse schoolyards and austere rural landscapes, repeated blue smocks, lace collars, braids, and embroidered phrases create visual continuity, while gestures, handholding, tentative stances, and expressions ranging from amusement to self-consciousness distinguish one encounter from another. The serial format thus moves between comparison and particularity.
Working within her large-format portrait practice, Winship used natural light and processed her own black-and-white film. She visited thirteen schools and, because film was limited, chose smaller schools or individual classes so that she would not have to select some children while refusing others. Direction was restrained: she asked the girls to face the lens and usually made a single exposure per portrait.
The series was published in 2008 by Images en Manœuvres and Foto8 in different formats, followed by a Turkish edition from Fotografevi. It was exhibited that year at Les Rencontres d'Arles and in the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition. The series received first prize in the World Press Photo Portraits/Stories category, the Sony World Photography Awards L'Iris d'Or, and the Godfrey Argent Award. Later presentations included Kunsthal Rotterdam, Fundación MAPFRE's 2014 Winship survey, and the Barbican's 2018 retrospective. In 2023 it was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet cycle Human, whose touring exhibition reached Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires in 2025.
