FRANCESCA WOODMAN (1958 -1981)

Francesca Woodman in her short life produced over 500 self-portraits, and when I first saw her work I thought she was very daring, showing so much of herself both physically and emotionally.

Her pictures were often shot in deserted buildings, using mirrors and blurred movements to evoke feelings of being and not being there, kind of a ghostly exhibitionist. What was she trying to say? Was she being narcissistic? Immediately I’m drawn to think she wanted attention, but for some reason here personality was holding her back, she did hence was hiding in her technique. She wanted to be naked, but she didn’t want to show herself.

Francesca Woodman, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, © Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman, Tate Modern

Bright, (2010) states, “It is difficult not to read Woodman’s many self-portraits – she produced over five hundred during her short lifetime – as alluding to a troubled state of mind. She committed suicide at the age of twenty-two.”

However, her mother Betty in an interview with The Guardian, Cooke, R. (2014), expressed an opposite opinion, “You can reinterpret her pictures if that’s your point of view. But I don’t think that was there. Everybody was tied in knots about politics in the 70s, but she wasn’t interested.” She goes on to say Francesca wasn’t a“deeply serious intellectual”; she was witty, amusing and “she had a good time,”. Betty goes on to say Francesca’s “life wasn’t a series of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them… Why did she put herself in the images? Francesca once said that it was just a matter of convenience: she was always available, whereas finding a model would take time.”

So can we say that there is evidence to support Bright’s comments? We can all psycho-analyse events after the fact and read into them whatever, we think and parents imparticular in a situation like Francesca Woodman’s will try to look away from the fact that her legacy i.e. her photographs pointed to something they missed.

Woodman’s pictures are dark and they are conveying unseen feeling perhaps of repression, but we can never know if that was truly how she felt – those closest to her believe the suicide was impulsive brought on by her own perceived failure as an artist not deep-rooted depression.

References

Cooke, R. (2014). Searching for the real Francesca Woodman. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].