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seeing yourself 

Francesca Woodman



by Aleina Edwards  |  May 1


Francesca Woodman was dead before she turned twenty-three. Maybe it’s distracting to start with that detail, but that’s the first thing I learned about her. She was a photographer, raised by two artists in Boulder, Colorado, and is most famous now for her self-portraits.


  The self in these portraits is elusive. She is often naked, but obscured by architecture or furniture, limbs hazy. In a photograph of three nude female models [1], each one holds up a photo of Francesca’s face over their own—it’s unclear if Francesca herself is present. In another photograph titled My House [2], we see a crumbling corner of a room, an empty bookshelf, a body—presumably Francesca’s—wrapped in sheets of plastic. She is barely recognizable as a woman. She is something shoved in a corner.


Her subject is relationship itself: the relationship between her psyche and her body; between her body and the space it occupies; between the photograph and viewer. There are notes scratched along the margins of some photos. On an image of Francesca in a brick kiln [3], twisting to fit into the cramped space, her head swaying, face blurred: Bunny bun I’m in the photolab come fetch me if the mood or a rock should strike you. She is writing to her boyfriend. In the image, one of her arms is raised; it curls around her head, as if to grasp at her hair. As if to pull.


Come fetch me. Photography captures—that’s the usual verb. It snatches, it fixes, it pins. It began as a science, not an art, a manner of recording the world as it truly was. At first I wanted to say Francesca upended that convention, but now I think she depended on it. Her work shows her as she really was: present but inaccessible, volatile. That’s how I feel when I look at her images. That’s how I’ve felt in my own body—that it’s not mine at all, that I have no say over it. Her clothes, ditsy florals and ethereal cotton, make sense for the ‘70s but read as older, like Victorian signifiers of femininity. I would want to shed them too. The interiors she shoots in are empty and dilapidated, but she is young and vivid. She becomes more or less than an actual person; she is a point of comparison. In a piece called Self-deceit [4], Francesca crawls around the corner of a crumbling wall, looking at herself in a fractured mirror propped against it. Her head and shoulders are softened with motion, her hair is wrapped up into a crown of braids. The photo evokes what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the mirror stage, that period when children begin to conceive of themselves as a body in space. A girl given shape by a gaze, external or self-imposed.

 
That was the issue for Francesca. She was obsessed with her public image, desperate for commercial success. She kept journals, diaries—even there, omniscient narration: Does it read as a book one wonders. She is thinking about narrative shape, curious if her life sounds like story. She had been an excellent student, but she languished in New York after graduating from RISD. She struggled for recognition from galleries and collectors who didn’t take photography seriously. Francesca’s photos feel like attempts at consolidation, like laments about disintegration. When she and a boyfriend broke up in 1981, she jumped from a window. Not to teach people a lesson, she wrote in her final journal entry. Simply the other side.



[1] About Being My Model, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

[2] My House, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

[3] Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–1978

[4] Self-Deceit #1, 1978