18 Dec 2015

Francesca Woodman: An American Genius

Francesca Woodman: Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (1976)
Tate / National Galleries of Scotland (AR00352)
© George and Betty Woodman


I have to confess that I only recently came across the work of American photographer Francesca Woodman, but I was immediately fascinated by her beautiful (often disturbing) black and white images which have a queer, gothic and surreal quality that is seductive in the sense that Baudrillard gives the term. That is to say, the photos partake of a game of slow exposure that is all to do with appearance and disappearance, and playing with the signs of sexuality and self-hood.

Woodman works in a manner that is not only highly stylized and disciplined, but also ritualistic and fetishistic; a combination of primitive magic and aristocratic aestheticism. She turns her own body into just another object, semi-exposed, but mostly withdrawn and concealed, existing in relation to other things (chairs, doors, mirrors, a bucket full of eels) that are equally real, equally fragile, and equally mysterious.

Born in 1958, Woodman was only twenty-two when she committed suicide in 1981, pissed, apparently, with the slowness with which her work was garnering critical attention or achieving commercial success. In a letter to a friend (written around the time of an earlier attempt to end her life), Woodman says she’d rather die young and leave behind her a delicate body of work, than see herself and her pictures fade away or be slowly erased by time.

Death, she realised, would be the making of her; for hers, like Nietzsche's, would be a posthumous existence. And this tragic realisation, coupled to her precocious talent for blurred image-making, makes me very fond of dear Francesca: an American genius.


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