Dearly Beloved
Dearly Beloved
Photographs by: Jim Grover
Curation by: Vanessa Winship
15 October - 15 November 2021 University Church of St Mary the Virgin, The High Street, Oxford OX1 4BJ
Opening times: Mondays-Fridays: 9.30am-5pm; Sundays 12-5pm.
Dearly Beloved portrays the ministry of 10 women priests in the Church of England through a combination of images and text. The original project was commissioned by the Bishop of Southwark to mark the 25th anniversary of the ordination of women and was first exhibited as Here Am I in the Oxo Gallery on London’s south bank in the summer of 2019, where it attracted 8,000 visitors and national media coverage.
Dearly Beloved has been specially created for this year’s Photo Oxford to reflect the festival’s theme: ‘Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and being seen’. Jim invited acclaimed British photographer, Vanessa Winship, to work with a body of work comprising over 200 of his original images and 160 pages of the personal testimonials that he created with the 10 featured women in order to curate a fresh new perspective of ministry, as seen through Vanessa’s eyes.
More information
The ten women priests featured in Dearly Beloved were chosen to represent the wide variety of ministry in the Diocese of Southwark, which embraces south London suburban parishes, prisons, hospitals, and leafy Surrey villages. They were also chosen to reflect a broad range of backgrounds, circumstances and experiences. Jim made the work over the course of 9 months in 2018 and 2019, exploring and documenting each of these women’s distinctive ministries through a combination of photographs and interviews.
The exhibition is presented in the Brome chapel in The University Church of St Mary the Virgin. The exhibition comprises some 32 black and white prints and accompanying text. Around half of the exhibited prints were not featured in the original Here Am I exhibition and so this new curation, coupled with Vanessa’s use of narrative from the women’s testimonials within the body of the exhibition, makes this a fresh and revealing presentation of ministry.
The exhibition poses questions of not only how we perceive each other, but also highlights some of the challenges and struggles these remarkable women face as they each bring something they firmly believe to be of the greatest importance to their respective communities, their ministry.
Exhibition visitors will also be able to buy the exhibition catalogue that accompanied the original Here Am I exhibition.
About Jim Grover
Jim is an award-winning self-taught British documentary photographer. His passion is to use images to tell stories that celebrate daily life, communities and traditions, unsung heroes…and to make the unseen seen. Most of his work is created over the course of many months.
His work has been exhibited in solo shows and covered by national media. Recent exhibited work includes ‘Of things not seen’ (2016); ‘48 Hours on Clapham High Street’ (2017); ‘Windrush: Portrait of a Generation’ (2018); ‘Here Am I’ (2019); and ‘Covid Tales from Tom’s Bench’ (2020). He is currently working on two major exhibitions planned for 2022.
Jim teaches documentary photography at the Leica Akademie. www.jimgroverphotography.com
About Vanessa Winship
Vanessa is an award-winning British photographer who works on long term projects of portrait, landscape, reportage and documentary photography. These personal projects have been in Britain, Western and Eastern Europe and the USA. She now shares her time between photography and teaching.
In 2018 the Barbican Art Gallery in London staged a major solo exhibition of her work, following a major solo exhibition at the Fundacian Mapfre gallery in Madrid. Her work has also been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London and prominently at Rencontres d'Arles in France. In 2019 Tate Britain acquired a collection of her work. This October Vanessa will present a new body of work, inspired by her time on the West Coast of Cumbria, as part of the West Coast Photo Festival in Cumbria.
Her books have been widely acclaimed and include Schwarzes Meer (2007), Sweet Nothings (2008), She Dances on Jackson (2013), Vanessa Winship (2016), And Time Folds (2018), and Sete (2019).
Winship has won several prestigious awards: the HCB award from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (being the first woman to do so); an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society; and 'Photographer of the Year' at the Sony World Photography Awards. She is a member of Agence Vu photography agency.