PHOTO:Francesca Woodman-On Being an Angel
On 19/1/1981 Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from the window of a N. York loft. As a photographer, she was prodigious and original. Although she used different cameras and film formats during her career, most of her photographs were taken with medium format cameras she created at least 10,000 negatives, which her parents now keep and 120 published images and comprise one of the most stunning and studied oeuvres in American photography. She was 22 years old when she died.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
Francesca Goodman’s preferred subject was herself from the first time she picked up a camera as a teenager. The fact that her main subject was her own body would logically place her work within the genre of self-portraiture, but she transforms it into a far more complicated and ambiguous undertaking. Not only is she both subject and author in her works, but her photographs explore gender, representation and body. Her aesthetic world reveals surrealist influences, with frequent use of mirrors, doubles, shadows, masks, and sexual symbols, bringing to mind the works of photographers such as Hans Bellmer, and Man Ray. Woodman’s output includes several portraits using herself and her friends as models. The intimate nature of the subject matter is enhanced by the small formats. Her work is usually divided into periods, from her early works, her years as a student in Providence, in Italy, at the MacDowell Colony, and lastly in New York from 1979 until she died. Analyses of her work are often linked to her biography and chronology. During her active years, Woodman produced thousands of images and she also tried other techniques such as large-format diazotypes, color photography and video. The words, short sentences, or quotations she scrawled on many of her prints have since given those pieces their titles. Woodman had only a few exhibitions during her life, some of which, in alternative spaces in New York and Rome. In early 1981, her artist’s book “Some Disordered Interior Geometries” was published, this was one of seven notebooks (including photographs that were glued in) that she worked with from 1976 onwards. The exhibition “Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel” at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm is comprised of 102 photographs from most of her thematic groups including “Polka Dots”, “From Angel series”, “Swan Song”, “Charlie the Model” and her large “Caryatid (Study for a Temple Project)” and one video. In Woodman’s active years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, photography was in a period of transition. Many photographers who had worked with classic black and white photography were experimenting with other forms, pushing the documentary tradition towards more subjective and surrealist projects.
Info: On Being an Angel, Curator: Anna Tellgren, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 5/9-6/12/15, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri: 10:00-20:00, Wed, Thu, Sat & Sun: 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se
