Four Things about
Francesca Woodman
by Letitia Trent
1. Francesca Woodman is the First Photographer
I Knew by Name
Francesca Woodman died in 1981, at the age
of 22, by jumping out of a window.
I wish that this wasn’t the first thing
that most people know about Francesca Woodman. Knowing her end means that we
search her images for traces of that end everywhere—her blurry body parts are
not simply blurry body parts, but hints at her unrecognizable face post-death.
Hints of her desire to erase herself. Dying young and by your own hand means
that everything you did before that death—even if the death might have been in
a fever of self-loathing, a momentary burst of despair immediately regretted as
soon as the act became irreversible—is combed for clues, as if you’d always
been planning it with every word or diary entry or photograph. Maybe she was.
Maybe she wasn’t. Is this a useful way to read the work of any artist? Is it
even possible to avoid reading her work this way?
I first saw Woodman’s work in 1999, when I
was 18 years old, without the context of the end of her life. I probably did a
Yahoo search for “female photographers” or saw her linked on a livejournal
page.
When I first saw her work, I had two
reactions: I instantly loved her photographs and I knew that we were both obsessed
with death.
2. Ghosts and Angels
Woodman’s most famous photographs are
self-portraits, many of which seem to be about death, or at least the spectral.
One set, called “The Angel Series”, features a photograph with two plastic
sheets suspended in the air like wings, and Woodman, naked from the waist-up, jumping
as though trying to reach them.
In another series, she poses in a decrepit apartment building, the wallpaper
peeling to reveal the wall beneath. Her interiors are bleak, haunted places,
full of broken objects.
In several of Woodman’s photographs, she is
obscured by strips of wallpaper, hidden behind great sheets of it, and pressed
against the peeling and dirty walls. Sometimes it seems like her body is trying
to sink into the walls of the building, while in others, she is trying to make
the body yet another object, and in others, that she is making herself a ghost,
a blurry object in the background, caught by accident behind the focal point of
the composition.
In other photographs, her body or the
bodies of her models are alarmingly real and confront the camera. In some
pictures (rarely, but it’s shocking when it happens), her face is clearly
turned toward the camera, often bearing a look of slight amusement or surprise
or what seems to be mock seriousness.
3. Things I Don’t Want to Think About the Way
I Think About Francesca Woodman:
It’s almost embarrassing to like Francesca
Woodman because she is sometimes called a photographer “for women” and “about
women” or “about female identity”, much like Sylvia Plath is often thought of
as a “women’s poet”, and it’s sometimes embarrassing to have the mark of Plath
on your poems as it is embarrassing to have the mark of Woodman on your
photography. Why is it embarrassing? Embarrassing because both women kept journals
(a thing often dismissed as “girly” to do, when done by a woman) and both were
interested in the physicality of the body and the gothic decay of the body/home
and both killed themselves at a young age and both have been dismissed as
navel-gazers who used their threats of suicide and their beauty as a way to get
attention and (this is really a claim—read any comment thread on an article
about Woodman or Plath and see) that they both died to advance their careers.
It’s
embarrassing to be embarrassed about liking things “for women” or “about female
identity” because one then realizes how deeply ingrained embarrassment about
the female body/art is and, I will begin to say “I” now, it’s embarrassing how
sometimes I want somebody to assure me that Woodman actually was the genius I
think she is and not a self-obsessed chronicler of her own culturally
agreed-upon beautiful body displayed in pieces and blurs or a “kitschy
throwback” according to the New York Times or a talented girl who earned her
fame partly by throwing herself from a building when she was still beautiful enough
for anyone to care.
I would like to read a review of Woodman that
does not say or even imply even one of the following ideas: She was talented,
but not original. She was clearly a serious artist, but too self-obsessed and
narrow. She had a unique vision, but that vision matters mostly because she is
dead.
4. I wanted to be Francesca Woodman
I got my first digital camera in 2000, and
the first thing I did with it was create self-portraits in the hot, crowded,
ugly rooms of my small apartment. I wore garage sale dresses with rips and
unworkable zippers and posed under the table, in corners, on the dirty floor,
usually mid-movement. I had an obsessive desire to capture myself in ways that
both obscured and highlighted my physical body—I wanted to be there, but not be
there. I had learned this from fashion photography, from literature, from Edgar
Allen Poe, who said the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic
in the world, and so my pictures had an element of erasure, of blurring, of the
body disappearing, of death. Somehow, taking a picture of myself in one moment
in time felt like performing a kind of death, but I did not understand why, and
I wanted to figure it out visually.
Of course, I had also learned this from
Francesca Woodman.
Woodman’s use of her own body as an object of
inquiry and her staged compositions in crumbling interiors are the easiest
surface elements of her work to imitate, but less easy to duplicate are her
irony, her interest in looking deeply at how we create identity through
reflection and imitation, and her ability to translate internal states into
images. I was never very good at it, so I gave it up. I didn’t have the
obsessive need that Woodman seemed to have, a need that made her take thousands
of meticulously staged, inventive photographs over a period of less than seven
years. I also didn’t have the talent.
In one famous image, her photocopied face
is held before the faces of three naked women—
—is Francesca Woodman really in the picture at all? And what does it mean to be
in a photograph anyway, to be
rendered a flat object amongst other objects? Throughout Woodman’s photographs,
there is a thread of obsessive examination and inquiry into exactly what a body
is, how we identify a person in a photograph, and what a person is at all
anyway, if a person can be both the creator of an image and the representation
inside of it.
***
Letitia Trent's work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, Mipoesias, Ootoliths, Blazevox, and many others. Her books include the full-length collection One Perfect Bird and the chapbooks "You aren't in this movie" (dancing girl press), Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University's The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony.
