SelfSelector

For a brief period –unfortunately too short– there was a promising and shining female photographer making her way through the exciting New York art scene of the last years of 70′s turning into the early 80′s. She was called Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and since her early death she has been one cult figure for photography lovers all over the world.
Her body of work has been subject of some exhibitions during the last couple of decades, like the one at the Fondation Cartier that took place in 1998, but hopefully the beautiful monography recently published by Phaidon will succed in task of bringing her closer to the audience.

The power of the images created by Francesca is definitely to be experienced and not be put into words, because their overwhelming magic would get lost in the process, but one could say few photographs can move the inner self in such a beautiful and, at the same time, uncanny manner. Francesca was young and full of ideas, influenced both by Gothic and Surrealist aesthetics and by the role of the body in space. Her work is very often haunting, as if inhabited by ghosts. One could think that her favourite subject was a romantic idealization of the girl turning into woman, but when reading her own words, one discovers that she was much more intrigued by the representation of the persons and objects in the space and the nature – the possibilities and limitations– of Photography itself.
As much young as she was (she has been defined as the first child prodigy of Photography), her work didnt come out of the blue. She was absorbing and learning from contemporary photographers such as Duane Michaels –with whow she shared the love for bluring bodies in movement, surrealist twists and the use of ambiguous sentences to complete the pieces–, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Ralph Gibbons and Deborah Turbeville, whose ambivalent career, both commercially succesful in the Fashion field and respected in the art scene, was a deep inspiration for Francesca.

“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…” Those seems to be questions and reflexions Francesca asked herself as she was creating and finding her own identity. Born to a family of artists (a painter father, a ceramist-sculptor mother and even a video-artist brother), she was raised in the perfect enviroment to start experimenting soon. And she did. She was given a camera at the age of 13 and right then she started to take pictures. Her Self-Portrait at thirteen, probably her first intentional “art” picture, is already interesting, misterious and shows much of what she would deliver in the next ten years.

Yes, most of Francesca’s pictures are, well, Francesca. And mostly naked. She has been criticised by some as some egocentrical teenager wanting to show off, which is surely not the case. Self-portrait is a very respected art genre, and a few years later the hundreds of self-representations by Cindy Sherman would be the “crème de la crème” of the avantgarde. And as Francesca herself used to say: “It is a matter of convenience, Im always available”, which is a fairly good reason for a starting photographer than wouldnt always find models when needed. Besides, that uninhibited use of her own body, not always well received at the time, was groundbreaking and opened a road also travelled by others like the before mentioned Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke or Marina Abramovic amongst others.
Born in Denver, Colorado, and later moved to New York to study Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), one of her biggest influences was Italy indeed. Her family was infatuated by that country (hence her very Italian first name) and took her there to summer trips every year, becoming fluent in that language. Later, she won a scholarship and spent a year in Rome continuing her education. There, not only she took some of her most famous photographs but also got in touch with a group of local artists, gathered at the Libreria Maldoror that encouraged, stimulated her and gave her the chance to have one of first exhibitions (in March 1978). There, at old bookstore, she found the old maths book that became Some Disordered Interior Geometries, her first (and last) book she made herself to be published. Her method was based on pasting her pictures scattered through the pages of the book, building an interesting contrast-relationship between the geometrical theories and diagrams contained in the book and her erotic, self-questioning body of work.

After her return of Rome she settled back in New York, and after just a week of the publication of her book, Francesca Woodman killed herself jumping out of the window of her loft in the Lower East Side. She was 22 years-old. Her death seems difficult to understand, given her youth, her talent, her good prospects for the future and the support of both her family and friends. But who could really know what was going on in her mind?
Her art was indeed truly coherent and almost too mature for a girl her age. Her sensitivity and intelligence are obvious and we all know that kind of thing is sometimes hard to handle. In the brief stracts of her diaries published at the Phaidon book she seems a bright, creative young girl infatuated by Gertrude Stein and by culture in general, but never she seems depressed or going through a self-destructive delirium. However, in a letter to a friend, sent in 1980, she wrote: “My life at this point is like very old coffee-cup sediment and I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments . . . instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things…”.

Thus, we could interpret some of her pictures as desire to die young, meant as a positive thing (as in the Gothic tradition), or maybe as a wish to just dissapear from this world. She was obsessed by angels (one of her most famous series being called On being an angel), and maybe she wanted to become one. Or a ghost. But we will never know what made her give up on life and her fascinating art. Her hallucinating body of work, that shows her dissolving, jumping, exploring life and death, and her early suicide are the perfect ingredients to build a cultural myth. The legend is already sorrounding her ghost, as it does with Sylvia Plath or Diane Arbus, other female geniuses that chose to die in the climax of their creativity.
Legend or not, there are much of us who grief everyday for the amazing and moving images and moments she deprived us from.

Bibliography: Francesca Woodman by Chris Townsend. Phaidon (2006).