The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman
Francesca Woodman: House #3,
Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
Given that
her complete catalogue is composed almost entirely of work she
produced as a student, the posthumous critical esteem for American
photographer Francesca Woodman is astonishing. Unlike music or
math, where precocious displays of talent are not uncommon, photography
tends not to have prodigies. Woodman, who committed suicide in
1981 at age 22, is considered a rare exception. That she has achieved
such status is all the more remarkable considering only a quarter
of the approximately 800 images she produced many of them self-portraits-have
ever been seen by the public.
Now, on the
thirtieth anniversary of her death, Woodman is having something
of a moment. In coming months, her work will be shown by several
British galleries, and later this year San Francisco's Museum
of Modern Art will mount a major retrospective of her work, the
first of its kind in the United States. In 2012, the show will
travel to the Guggenheim. The Woodmans. Scott Willis's
thoughtful new documentary about the photographer and her family-opened
last week at Film Forum in New York.
Taken between
1972 and 1981, Woodman's photographs are almost all black-and-white
and have a general softness of focus not often seen these days.
They depict a world almost identical to the one captured by earlier
generations of photographers, as if Woodman's camera were a
filter through which the neon clutter of contemporary life could
not pass. Some of these images have the polished smoothness of
Surrealist photographs, like those of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer,
in which precisely-rendered objects are arranged so deliberately
it seems the slightest movement would alter the meaning entirely.
(Fluent in Italian, Woodman spent her junior year in Rome, where
she paid frequent visits to the Libreria Maldoror, a bookshop-gallery
that specialized in work about and by Surrealists, and which ultimately
hosted her first small show.) She makes use of many Surrealist
motifs, among them mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls. Like Magritte,
she often shrouds her subjects in white sheets.
Her concealed
figures, however, call to mind corpses, or ghosts, as if the wall
between our world and the spirit realm had begun to fall. In her
images, dust abounds, and there are no new buildings, only ruins,
whose disintegrating forms evoke the wrecks admired by the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Gothic revivalists often cited as major
influences. The out-of-focus figures are faint and friable-seeming,
and Woodman's gray tones as powdery as crumbling stone. "To
Die,' reads the inscription on a Victorian tombstone that appears
in one of Woodman's early images, "is Gain.'
George
and Betty Woodman
Francesca
Woodman: Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
The phrase
is more than apt. What little is known of Woodman's archive has
proven itself capable of supporting a monumental reputation, the
nude portraits of herself and other young models bearing much
of the weight. Since her rediscovery in the mid-1980s, Woodman
has continued to attract the attention of audiences and critics.
Her work is in the permanent collections of many museums-among
them the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of
American Art-and her style has so informed other professional
and amateur photographers that effects she pioneered now appear
in catalogues and ad campaigns and fashion spreads. She can even
be credited with the coining of visual clichés: shots of
women's legs, a Woodman favorite, are now considered the adolescent's
stock in trade.
Born in 1958
to artist-parents-mother Betty Woodman is a ceramicist and sculptor,
father George a painter and photographer-Woodman was largely
unknown during her lifetime. Her work was first introduced to
the public at a Wellesley College exhibition that opened in 1986,
five years after her suicide. At the time, much significance was
attached to its apparently autobiographical qualities, which continue
to intrigue audiences today. Her death does not simply cast a
shadow on the images, but suffuses them with a strange, spectral
light, in which everyone looks like Woodman-photographs of models
are frequently mistaken for self-portraits-and facts resemble
foresight. The artist seems always to be anticipating her own
disappearance. In one of her first genuine self-portraits, which
she produced as a boarding school student in the early 1970s,
Woodman creeps naked from the forest, eyes closed. In another,
taken a few years later, it appears that the roots of a tree on
a riverbank are seizing her naked body from the water-or that
she is transforming into a tree herself, her pale, flowing hair
and slender leg as soft and tentacular as roots. The tree, whose
trunk seems to emit a white, alien light, is in a graveyard.
George
and Betty Woodman
Francesca
Woodman: Untitled, Boulder, Colorado 1976
The same graveyard
can be seen in an earlier untitled piece, in which Woodman crawls
naked through an opening in a tombstone, her moving body captured
on camera as a misty blur, as if she were as insubstantial and
inhuman as the air around her. It is the earliest example of the
technique that became one of her trademarks: by using slow shutter
speeds, she gave her subjects time to move, and on film motion
tends to obliterate the thing moving. In later images-produced
as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and afterwards
in Italy and Manhattan-flesh appears as fog, vapor evaporating
or being absorbed by its surroundings. In one 1976 photograph,
a girl seems to float, like smoke, inside a fireplace. In another,
taken a year later, she melts into-or perhaps emerges from-the
wallpaper. Like the early Colorado picture, both are long exposures.
Woodman referred to the series as "ghost pictures.'
George
and Betty Woodman
Francesca
Woodman, Untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 1972'1975
Her first
suicide attempt came three years later, in the autumn of 1980.
She survived, received psychiatric treatment, and moved in with
her parents, who were also living in Manhattan. Early that winter,
she published a small book called Some Disordered Interior
Geometries. Then a grant application was denied, her bicycle
stolen. A romance continued to turn sour. Her parents suspect
she stopped taking her medication. On January 19, 1981, she jumped
from the roof of a building on the East Side. Nobody at the scene
knew Woodman's name, nor did it appear on any of her belongings,
and so her body remained unclaimed at the morgue until someone
identified her clothes. The fall had rendered her face unrecognizable.
*
A distinguished
television news producer, C. Scott Willis had never heard of Woodman
when he met her parents several years ago, at a brunch hosted
by his cousin. Nor had he directed a film: The Woodmans,
which was inspired by that chance encounter, is his first, and
he keeps its structure simple. Interwoven with Woodman's experimental
videos, journal entries, and photographs, some of which have never
before been made available to the public, are interviews from
which Willis omits himself entirely. We hear and see only Woodman's
friends and family, her parents in particular-and, in the brief
clips Willis culls from her video projects, Woodman herself. Everyone
agrees that Woodman's work is too often evaluated in light of
her suicide, her ghostly portraits miscast as experiments in self-effacement.
"Francesca Woodman,' a friend says firmly, "was not trying
to disappear.' Willis shows Woodman's footage of a project
inspired by an overturned flour truck, the result of which is
a black trace of a body, a void surrounded by white dust. We hear
Woodman's delighted appraisal: "Oh, I'm really pleased!'
Willis traces
Woodman's aesthetic motivations to her childhood in Colorado
and in Italy, where the Woodmans had a second home. Wherever the
Woodmans were, George says, art "was considered serious business.'
In the mid-1960s, they often hosted visiting artists, among them
David Hockney and Richard Serra. Whenever the family visited a
museum Woodman and her brother, now a video artist, were provided
with sketchbooks, and it was George who gave the teenage Woodman
her first camera, the same Yashica 2¼ x 2¼ she would use for
most of her career. Contemporary footage of Colorado serves briefly
as scenic backdrop to the film's account of Woodman's youth,
and it's easy to imagine how the winter landscape worked its
silent, icy influence. The frozen world is white and black and
gray, and looks like nothing so much as one of Woodman's prints.
In order to
avoid making her suicide the climax of the film, which would mean
once again presenting it as central to her life and work, Willis
frames Woodman's story with that of her parents. The Woodmans
begins and ends with Betty and George discussing their own work,
in particular a sculpture Betty was commissioned to produce for
the American Embassy in Beijing, and whose progress Willis tracks
throughout the film. Its installation is at once triumphant and
bittersweet. The elder Woodmans often feel their reputations depend
on their daughter's-as if, as Betty puts it, "she's the
famous artist and we're the famous artist's family.' George
recalls that Woodman killed herself a few days before the opening
of his own Guggenheim show.
George
and Betty Woodman
Francesca
Woodman: Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975'1976
The Woodmans
dispenses with the image some may have of the young photographer
as a tortured naif, whose suffering was uncorrupted by ambition
or the desire to do anything besides disappear. Francesca cultivated
her reputation and knew, as her friend Betsy Berne wrote, "how
to play the game.' Having artists for parents, one friend informs
Willis, made success seem imperative, and obscurity particularly
painful. It was necessary, she told her father, to make at least
one career-related phone call every day. The process of creating
a coherent public image is explored in her journal, where she
often referred to herself in the third person. In one 1975 entry,
she mentions having shown the journal to a friend. "Does it,'
she writes, "read as a book one wonders.'
Woodman's
interest in self-presentation-and self-preservation-emerges even
in a note written around the time of her first suicide attempt.
"I finally managed,' she explains, "to try to do away
with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible…. I would rather
die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship
with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell
erasing all of these delicate things.' Woodman reverses the traditional
terms of the arrangement: death, like photography, is simply a
series of chemical reactions. Living is "erasing'; dying
a way of ensuring that what was will continue to be, of fixing
certain things in place. When Woodman died, she left behind an
unpublished artist's book, a set of five images, called Portrait
of a Reputation.
But what accounts
for the current wave of interest in Woodman? Why do young artists
in particular consider her a "rock star,' as one photography
professor puts it in The Woodmans? A note Woodman wrote
on the edge of an early print perhaps provides a clue: "There
is the paper and then there is the person.' Self-portraits,
once a challenge, are now the easiest kind of image to produce.
We just face our laptop and it snaps a picture or records a video.
In this position, taking photographs feels exactly like not taking
photographs, and being recorded is just like being: we sit back,
or type, or wander away. We are increasingly unable to register
the creation of an image as a particular, contingent event, and
many of the pictures we see are as unmemorable as the circumstances
in which they were created.
George
and Betty Woodman Francesca Woodman: From Angel series,
Rome, 1977
Perhaps this
is why Woodman, who produced in her entire life fewer pictures
than are uploaded to Facebook every second, has lately been attracting
our attention. Her images offer our atrophied organs of perception
occasion to exert themselves, forcing us to focus on the moment
of their creation. Woodman often planned her pieces far in advance,
sketching them as a painter might, and in her journal characterized
one of her long exposures as a portrait of "legs-and time.'
Her wording recalls a statement issued by early photographer William
H. Fox Talbot in the 1830s, when he praised the infant medium's
ability to document "the injuries of time.' He had in mind
the comparison of two photographs-one old, one new, both of
the same subject.
Woodman reveals
the injuries that occur in the time it takes to produce a single
picture: hair turns wispy, flesh fades and stretches into smoke.
The longer her shutter stays open, the blurrier and more transparent
bodies will appear, until at last they disappear. Shortly before
her death, she began experimenting with a particularly long development
process that required her to spend several hours producing a single
photograph. In the end, her camera captures not the girl but the
long moment it looked at her.
The
Woodmans is showing at Film Forum in New York through
February 1.
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