Francesca Woodman

Denver, 1958 – Nova York, 1981

The model for most of her own photographs, Francesca Woodman worked mainly with self-portraits. In her pictures, set inside rundown houses, young women present themselves in ambivalent situations that suggest both strength and fragility. Sometimes her figures were photographed in movement, creating long-exposure shots of gossamery shapes seen in either dilapidated surroundings hostile to their presence or in the more welcoming bosom of nature.

Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22, after a long battle with depression, suggests a layer of meaning that is hard to overlook in any critical appraisal of her work. She left behind a considerable corpus of 800 photographs, most of it produced during her student years. Today, her parents are custodians of her collection, which carries all the drama and sarcasm of a challenging artist who was master of her own propositions. Though very young, she succeeded in forging an experimental style of her own that cites surrealism and the faked ghost pictures of the 19^th century. Woodman’s art also touched upon performance and issues of gender and identity, weighty themes on the US art scene in the 70s.

[L.B.]