Francesca Woodman has been called a modernist, a surrealist and, even, a gothic artist. Her work carries echoes of all three traditions, but it evades categorisation. As a young woman, she photographed herself obsessively but often she appears as a blur of movement or a half-hidden figure, someone constantly trying to escape or hide. The end result is not self-portraiture, but a series of stills from a continuous performance in which she plays with the notion of the self, disguising, transforming and defacing her own body.
At Victoria Miro, around 50 of Woodman's photographs – small, old-fashioned-looking prints that seem to belong to a much earlier time – pay testament to a short, but creatively productive life. It ended, while still in full flow, when she threw herself off a building in New York in January 1981, following a long bout of depression. She was just 22, but left an archive of some 800 images, many of which have still not been seen.
Like Sylvia Plath, Woodman is an artist whose death has often impinged on the various readings of her work, imbuing these already complex images with another layer of mystery and, in some cases, foreboding. In a series of photographs she made in the mid-70s, when she was a student of photography at Rhode Island School of Design, her blurred, shadowy self is spectral, ghost-like.
It seems unlikely, though, that Woodman was prefiguring her own death in her work, rather than playing with themes of identity and with the role that photography, and in particular portrait photography, can play in constructing a fixed – and therefore false – identity.
Seeing so many photographs of Woodman, mostly naked, often posing in empty rooms with peeling paint and fading wallpaper, is a slightly disconcerting experience, though. It's not just that she becomes more elusive the more photographs you see, it's more the tightrope walk she takes between an almost adolescent self-obsession and artistic self-exploration. There are echoes in her work of older photographic, as well as artistic, traditions. Her nudes often recall Bellocq's haunting Storyville portraits of New Orleans prostitutes. One startling photograph of her legs bound tightly in ribbon or tape, her hand holding a striped glove that rests between her legs, has traces of the disturbing doll photographers of the German surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer.
I feel her work embodies emotional torture that she too felt as a young woman. I feel she links well with my topic because her use of heavy textures and partly concealed layers show a figure just waiting to fade in to obscurity. I would like to attempt a similar style in my own work.
At Victoria Miro, around 50 of Woodman's photographs – small, old-fashioned-looking prints that seem to belong to a much earlier time – pay testament to a short, but creatively productive life. It ended, while still in full flow, when she threw herself off a building in New York in January 1981, following a long bout of depression. She was just 22, but left an archive of some 800 images, many of which have still not been seen.
Like Sylvia Plath, Woodman is an artist whose death has often impinged on the various readings of her work, imbuing these already complex images with another layer of mystery and, in some cases, foreboding. In a series of photographs she made in the mid-70s, when she was a student of photography at Rhode Island School of Design, her blurred, shadowy self is spectral, ghost-like.
It seems unlikely, though, that Woodman was prefiguring her own death in her work, rather than playing with themes of identity and with the role that photography, and in particular portrait photography, can play in constructing a fixed – and therefore false – identity.
Seeing so many photographs of Woodman, mostly naked, often posing in empty rooms with peeling paint and fading wallpaper, is a slightly disconcerting experience, though. It's not just that she becomes more elusive the more photographs you see, it's more the tightrope walk she takes between an almost adolescent self-obsession and artistic self-exploration. There are echoes in her work of older photographic, as well as artistic, traditions. Her nudes often recall Bellocq's haunting Storyville portraits of New Orleans prostitutes. One startling photograph of her legs bound tightly in ribbon or tape, her hand holding a striped glove that rests between her legs, has traces of the disturbing doll photographers of the German surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer.
I feel her work embodies emotional torture that she too felt as a young woman. I feel she links well with my topic because her use of heavy textures and partly concealed layers show a figure just waiting to fade in to obscurity. I would like to attempt a similar style in my own work.
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