I've held off on writing about Francesca Woodman because she's probably my favorite photographer, and I've already written about her a good deal in essays, so my thoughts on her are numerous and somewhat non-linear. But at its base this blog is for tracking and organizing my inspirations, so I think it's time that I added her to the list.
I was told my freshman year in college during a critique to look at her work. Somehow she had not been on my radar before then. I immediately fell in love with her highly poetic self-portraits. I scoured the internet for images, and read quite a few essays on her. Eventually I broke down and bought this book by Chris Townsend, which has 250 of her photographs (I bought it at the MFA bookstore for MUCH less, I'm not sure why it's so expensive on Amazon). I could pour over it a million times and still find a new photograph that I think is the most beautiful.
Not only did Woodman have a natural eye for composition and make incredibly intelligent photographs (she references art history, literature), but her work made me for the first time consider photography as performance. Woodman was putting herself on display, not just her body but everything that was inside her, as she was working it out (her work was made from ages 13-22, when she died). Her haunting work explores the space between childhood and adulthood, femininity, sex, invisibility, reality, life, death.
The best online gallery I could find of her images is here.
images: heenan.net/woodman
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