Francesca Woodman's Disappearance
Space, time, and the body
Art had always been an integral part of Francesca Woodman’s life. The young girl studied photography in one of the best art schools in America, her father was a painter and photographer, her mother a ceramics sculptor, and her elder brother an aspiring video-artist.
Woodman began taking photographs when she was thirteen years old and went on to study photography at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence from 1975 to 1979. She spent many summers between her school years in Rome, where she frequently visited the Maldoror bookshop-gallery, which specialized in Surrealism. This led to her first solo exhibition, held in the bookshop’s basement gallery space. She had intended to make a career in photography and while she sent portfolios of her work to fashion photographers, her solicitations did not produce many positive results.
It is supposed that the failure of her work to attract attention led to sinking into depression. Woodman took her own life on January 19th, 1981. Since then, she has become one of the most talked about and influential contemporary photographers, her body of work elevating her to a cult figure status.
Woodman used photography as a window and a mirror. She photographed and staged herself, she was both artist and sitter, she was both a producer and receiver of meaning. The metamorphosis of her body, captured by her lens, has been read in numerous ways, often through the prism of Surrealism, feminism and the Gothic. All of these theorizations concern themselves with the way that Francesca utilizes space, time and her body in her photographs.
In her House series, Woodman’s figure is ghostly and blurred, it is curled in a fetal position, it is hiding in peeled wallpaper. It is a haunted house. It evokes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper - seclusion does not simply imprison, it consumes.
In surrealist art, the woman’s body is an object of fear and desire, a bearer of meaning, rather than a creator, which is exactly what Woodman deconstructs within her images. As she dissolves and transforms her body, she refuses to give the viewer the power to define it, removing herself physically, both metaphorically and literally, from the gaze.
Woodman is covered by the wallpaper, swallowed by the fireplace, engulfed in light or distorted in shadow; she is devoured by the surrounding space…But is she? Maybe her photographs are not a portrayal of imprisonment, but of escape. It is so seductive to imagine her as a tragic figure being consumed by despair that we sometimes forget to see her as a person, a woman with agency and creative vision. Woodman possessed extensive knowledge in art history and was a skilled photographer, at times people forget this, preferring to view her as a depressed young girl who took her life and who shed her skin in front of the lens.
Woodman disrupted the space within the photograph with her own body. Rather than being devoured by it she perhaps posed a question on the very significance and confinement of time and space within photography. Woodman controlled the camera, her body disrupted the space in front of the lens and through her metamorphosis, she broke the regulations of time.
Is she disappearing, or is she coming into being? Could it be both? The way Woodman’s body relates to the space around it seems to be transformative, as it fades in and out of its surroundings, almost like a game of hide and seek with the camera. The body is both present and absent, materialising and dissolving.
I hope you have enjoyed this introduction to the work of Francesca Woodman. If you would like to learn more about works motivated by magic and Surrealism, consider subscribing to this newsletter and following its visual companion on Instagram.
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I watched the documentary about her a decade ago and it hit me very hard for some reason. I really like her work. I read somewhere that she had been referred to as the Sylvia Plath of photography and I think that is fitting. Tragic but beautiful artist ❤️
Obsessssed with this! She’s been one of my very favorite artists for a long time