Francesca Woodman, The photographer beyond the tragedy
Biography
The Woodmans [2010] by
Jordana Lee YouTubeChannel.
Francesca Woodman was born in Denver in 1958 into a family of artists: her father George was a painter, her mother Betty a ceramicist. Art was simply the household's daily business. Italy was the second constant. The family spent long summers in a farmhouse outside Florence, so Woodman grew up moving between the Colorado art faculty and Tuscan museums, and she spoke fluent Italian from childhood.
Photography was hers alone, a medium neither parent worked in. She was given a camera at thirteen and took her first self-portrait that same year. At boarding school in Massachusetts she found a teacher who took her seriously, and by the time she entered the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975 she was already working as an artist rather than a student.
The turning point was the year she spent in Rome in 1977–78 as part of a RISD program. There she found the Libreria Maldoror, a counter-cultural bookshop devoted to Dada and Surrealism, and through it the writing of André Breton, a circle of young Italian artists, and her first European solo show in March 1978. She returned to Providence to finish her degree, then moved to New York in 1979 to build a career. It was slow going: her portfolios went to fashion photographers and led nowhere. Still, the work kept growing, in a residency at the MacDowell Colony in 1980, in large diazotype pieces, and in her artist's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries, published at the start of 1981.
Woodman died in January 1981, at twenty-two, leaving around 800 prints and thousands of negatives. In her lifetime she had exhibited in only a few alternative spaces in Rome and New York. Her first museum retrospective came in 1986, and major shows since, including SFMOMA and the Guggenheim in 2011–12, have made her one of the most influential photographers of her generation. Her family and friends have long asked that her work not be read only through the way her life ended, and that seems the right way to approach it here too.
Approach and Technique
She Was Too Ahead of Her Time — The Tragic Genius of Francesca Woodman by The Eternal Women YouTube channel
Woodman worked small and worked close. Most of her pictures were made on medium-format cameras that produce square negatives, and most of her prints are no larger than a sheet of letter paper. That scale gives her work an intimacy that a gallery wall of huge prints could never have.
Her stage was the ruined interior: empty rooms, peeling wallpaper, old doors, mirrors, curtains. Into these she put a body, usually her own, which she explained plainly as a matter of convenience. It was always available, and directing yourself is easier than directing someone else. What that body does in the frame is the substance of her work. It blurs through long exposures, hides behind objects, or merges with a wall or a tree, and the face is often cut off or turned away. The figure seems to be either emerging from the space or being absorbed by it.
Behind the images lay a lot of reading. She wanted her photographs to relate to words the way Breton's photographs relate to the text of Nadja, and she used nude figures with an ironic nod to classical painting. She said she liked the "rough edge that photography gives a nude", the way a photograph's immediacy struggles with timeless imagery, as in a pictorialist photograph. This is why her pictures feel both staged and spontaneous.
She also kept moving past the single print. She glued small photographs into old Italian school notebooks, adding handwriting so that text, image and the book's own content play against each other. She made videos at RISD. When she wanted a larger scale but had little money, she turned to the diazotype, the process used for architectural blueprints, and built monumental temples from posed figures and photographed fragments. Humor runs through all of it, more than its reputation for gloom suggests.
Personal Considerations
Francesca Woodman - On Being an Angel by
Photobook club with Alex Blanco YouTube Channel
Francesca was an exceptional photographer, more mature in vision, clarity of goals and craftsmanship than her age suggests. She grew up among working artists, and I suspect this was both a strength and a weight: a bar set very high simply by the house she lived in, even if, as far as those who knew her say, nobody pushed her toward it.
In Providence and in Rome she shone, full of ideas and projects, always able to make conceptual work with her own body or with others'. I see her as one of the great Surrealist photographers, in a line that goes back to Man Ray, and her work still deserves study and inspiration.
What I take from her is personal. I use intentional camera movement to convey fleeting presence, emotions and impulses, and I recognize that language in her blur. I appreciate her symbolism, and I would practice something like it myself if I had more space and more resources. More important is what she showed: that the naked body is not bound to sexual messages, and can carry other ideas.
In New York she met refusals. Her portfolios to fashion photographers led nowhere, an application to the National Endowment for the Arts was unsuccessful, and a relationship ended. She also exhibited there, and as The Woodmans suggests, she kept working almost to the end. Her artist's book, completed in late 1980, appeared around the time of her death. Some accounts link the depression she fell into in late 1980 to the lack of response to her work and to that breakup. Her father tied her death to the refused grant; her friend Betsy Berne points to illness. Depression can lie to a person about their own life and their own future. We can list what happened to her, but we cannot say what brought her to that point. Francesca Woodman took her own life in January 1981, at twenty-two.
What came after: a first museum retrospective in 1986, SFMOMA and the Guggenheim in 2011–12, the National Portrait Gallery in 2024. A master to study and be inspired by, and an important voice in the history of fine art photography.
Her work asks to be read with her own hands in it: blur, words on the picture, the body that hides and shows. The irreversibility of that ending leaves us with few certainties and many questions. We know what she left us; we will never know what she would have made next.
Recommending to anyone reading this that, if you feel psychologically bad the best thing to do is seeking help from a good specialist to talk to, I remember that art is, for all those other ones that are struggling and have yet energy inside, a good way to endure bad times and move forwards aim towards better times.
From this point I will always shout:
Shine on!