FRANCESCA WOODMAN'S
EXPLORATORY SELF-PORTRAITS
Many readers of Francesca Woodman’s photographs see a collection of self-portraits alluding to a troubled state of mind, a foreshadowing of the macabre; but Woodman’s parents refute this assessment, and instead, remember their daughter as the witty, amusing child, full of fun and photographic prowess.
Francesca Woodman
Eel Series, Venice, Italy, 1978
The family didn’t believe in hobbies on a Sunday, they believed in making art. To the extent that the Woodman tradition appears to state that any given artistic medium is reserved for one Woodman alone. In interviews, George Woodman keenly points out that he only turned to photography after Francesca’s death. And Charles, Francesca’s brother, states that still photography was always closed off to him due to Francesca’s photographic talents.
In her formative years, Francesca studied at Rhode Island School of Design. Ahead of her peers, and already described by several as a prodigy, her long-time friend, George Lange, recalls Francesca’s character as the ‘real deal’, adding that ‘She lived her art. She looked like her art. She had the vocabulary of art.’
George further remarked, ‘Francesca’s intensity was palpable. It scared me. I had never met anyone who could so clearly reveal a refined vision. She could also be a mess. Her place was a mess. Her photo technique stained. That mess is the texture of her work. She couldn’t control everything, but somehow with her touch, that mess became poetry.’
When one views Francesca Woodman’s photographic work, it’s almost too easy to contextualise the work with her suicide at the forefront. And with her tendency to self-dramatise, this image of an extraordinary, ethereal lost soul springs to mind.
Francesca Woodman Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island 1975-8
Her parents however, look beyond this reading of her work — ‘people like to mythologise artists’, her father George notes. Her mother’s belief is that ‘You can reinterpret her pictures if that’s your point of view. But I don’t think that was there. Everybody was tied in knots about politics in the 1970s, but she wasn’t interested.’ The family’s prevailing memories of Francesca was that she wasn’t solemn or a ‘deeply serious intellectual’.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled photograph, circa 1975-8
Francesca Woodman Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
Self-deceit #1, Rome Italy, 1978
Other themes that have been read into her work include juxtaposition: the relationship between the idealistic young body, compared to the nature of her crumbling, ruinous sets within the frame; metamorphosis: regularly visited in pictures where her body dissolves into the architecture; seriality and repetition: displayed through her many series of her own body and the occupying of compositional space within the frame; and lastly, appropriation: seen in the appropriation of stereotypes and the feministic interpretations pulled out of her work; especially the theory of the ‘male gaze’, by Abigail Solomon- Godeau, dating back to the mid-70s.
Betty maintains that Francesca ‘had a good time. Her life wasn’t a series of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them.’
Famous for her eerie and haunting self-portraits, Francesca is remembered as an American gothic artist with a surrealist twist. Her oeuvre contains over 800 photographs, many of the black and white, square format pictures include herself and other female models. She was often nude, or half-naked, and usually obscured by an object within the frame. The use of slow exposure often hauntingly blurs her body, toying with visual ideas of transience and the unstableness of time.
Untitled, from Polka Dots Series, Providence, Rhode Island 1976
Untitled, New York 1979–80
One day in 1904, the author Franz Kafka wrote a letter to a friend defining the books that are worth reading, ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound us’, he wrote. Likewise, Francesca Woodman’s photographs are worth reading. And whichever way one reads her photographs, to quote Kafka, they will timelessly aim ‘for the frozen sea within us.’
Space², Providence, Rhode Island 1976
George Lange, Untitled photograph, circa 1975-1978
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island 1975–8
George Lange, Untitled photograph, circa 1975-1978
(Left - Another almost square fashion photograph, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978; Right - I’m trying my hand at fashion photography, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977)
Thank you for reading,
Cluster Team & Kieran McMullan.