Written by Georgia Smith
24/09/2023
Content warning: descriptions of nudity, sexuality, and suicide.
‘I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.’
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
“Francesca Woodman is best known for photographing herself. But her pictures are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. She is often nude or semi-nude and usually seen half hidden or obscured.” An introduction to the late American artist Francesca Woodman by the Tate Modern details a distinct form of self-portraiture defined by the ambiguities of the self, the intricacies of embodiment, and the intimate and often liminal relationship between an individual and their surroundings. Titled ‘Finding Francesca’ the clipped piece outlines several assumptions concerning the nature of self-portraiture and the nature of the artist herself, imagining her work in a way which conforms to critical consensus. Such standard readings continue to be obsessed with the ideas of evasion and obscurity, placing clear emphasis upon her spiritual and surrealist tendencies as they relate to art historical legacies. Particularly, those of Man Ray and Claude Cahun. Yet, these readings neglect the potential for seduction and sexual intention within Woodman’s photographic play. Her aesthetic is at turns dark and delusive – and often alludes to the unreal or uncanny – but it is too an aesthetic indebted to a certain genre of fashion photography which invites a sense of attention and indulgence, evoking the idea of a body and subjectivity which was possessed at least in part by sexual desires and personal pleasures.
In her startingly and regrettably short career Woodman produced a body of photographic work preoccupied by human forms and their representation, gender, spaces, and the self. It was with an intellectuality indebted to the dreamy depths of surrealism and the various potential moods of symbolism that Woodman was able to shape an oeuvre which is both cohesive and utterly ephemeral – a paradox which captures the essence of Woodman’s subjectivity. At once haunted, claustrophobic, and surreal but equally if not more so poised, daring, and suggestive.
Perhaps one of the most renowned and stylistically archetypal of Woodman’s series of images is Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978. It plays knowingly with long exposures, derelict landscapes, and the image of fractured bodies. One of the most visually striking images is Untitled – as a great number of Francesca’s images are – an early comment upon the act of naming and its affinity with meaning. The picture sees Woodman’s naked body, headless and contorted, inside a long glass box. One arm reaches from inside the box to claw at the foremost pane of glass, an atmosphere of suffocation discernible and undeniably surreal. Shadows fall across Woodman’s body in what might have been a sultry manipulation of light, yet the reality of the obscuring of her face could only be disconcerting. A later image from the same series features the same box containing a large skull. Francesca stares fixedly from outside, embracing the smooth but rigid panes of glass. The sense of refinement these images exhibit emanates from their likeness to the deliberate and coquettish but ultimately disquieting styles of Ray and Cahun (see Ray’s Larmes (Tears) 1932 and Cahun’s Self Portrait 1925).
While Woodman’s career spanned only a single short decade there is a stark sense of self-assurance which stares both literally and figuratively from within several of her other photographs, marking the act of staring as a central sexual and surreal motif within her work. Her confidence persists despite both her youthfulness and the limited time she possessed in which to develop her craft. She was born in 1958 to artist parents (her mother a ceramicist and her father a painter), imbued with a sense of the artist’s sensibility from both her parents and their relationships with the likes of David Hockney and Richard Serra. As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Woodman was known for her almost ascetic practice. This was to be cut short by her suicide at the age of 22 in 1981. Woodman’s work feels sexually confident. Indicative of time spent alone with a body adored, it is sticky with a certain kind of sophistication which is amplified by the intimacy of the polaroid format of her images (her photographs were very rarely more than 5 inches in height or width) in which the body is both on show and a secret.
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island is dated between 1975 and 1976. My favourite image from within that series has a mirror at its centre (another central motif in Woodman’s work, see also ‘A Woman, A Mirror – A Woman is a Mirror for a Man’, 1975-1978). It lies flat on the floor, with Woodman crouched upon it. The top half of her body leans low towards the mirror’s reflection and is clothed in a light knit jumper, but she is otherwise naked. Her body is lithe, almost amphibious, she is agile not unlike a creature (a tiger perhaps). Yet one can read her body as both predator and prey. She possesses a look which is at once an accusation and an invitation; its ambiguity reflecting the instability of the self, something which critical appreciations of Woodman’s work underline most often in relation to her use of positioning and exposure, the acts of concealment that come to constitute many of her images.
It is, however, the numerous instances of “performance, play, and self-exposure” which appear infinitely more interesting. Her stare is a challenge to define or contain, a strict defiance of the traditional nonchalance of the nude. In his seminal Ways of Seeing, John Berger offers one of the most succinct, and now famous, conceptions of what it means to be a female subject in art. To Berger, the female form exists within art to be viewed. A woman “is not naked as she is” but instead “naked as the spectator sees her.” In debt to Berger’s thinking, art critic David Levi Strauss views the capturing of the female subject by the camera as a form of further imprisonment in which women are perpetually subject to the fetishes of a distinctly, and almost always predatory, voyeurism. Noting in his commentary on Woodman’s work the intensity of her subversion of such standards, of which this image is such a pertinent illustration.
The inscription beneath the image, featured on the pale white paper on which the photograph is mounted, reads “see you Sunday / Bow wow / Love spot.’”Written in red ink, the letters form a juvenile zig zag which is at once tender and agonising. Intended as a love note for her then boyfriend Benjamin P. Moore, from whom she was given the pet name ‘spot,’ one can imagine Woodman’s stare again as both an invitation and an accusation, made more intense by the knowledge that being perceived as a sexual being was her intention. It is images such as these which subjugate critics like Kenny, whose dull, sexually inhibited readings depend upon the denial of female sexual desire and reflect the restrictive and rather depressing idea that Woodman in some way “yields” to, or “strategically complies,” with the pornographic tendency of the male gaze. In portraying herself as a self-conscious object of fantasy Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island marks a point of departure in Woodman’s work. As White proposes, it complicates the worn interpretation of Woodman’s images as essentially preoccupied with evasion, each carefully composed image marking an attempt at obscuring or concealing her subjectivity, but never offering it up for show. It is in this image in particular that Woodman appears conscious of Berger’s claim that “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.”
There are several other instances in which one can read Woodman’s photographs as statements of seductive intention. Take On Being an Angel #1, the image favoured by Moderna Museet for the cover of the catalogue of their 2015 exhibition of the artist’s work. The most obviously sexual of Woodman’s images, On Being an Angel #1 sees Woodman as she occupies the top left corner of the frame. She lies on her back, arching her bare breasts towards the lens, her eyes again fixed in an absolute stare and framed in part by her curls (provocative as they appear recently undone). A stare which is shared once more with another Untitled image from the Providence, Rhode Island 1975-1978 series which sees Woodman sat to the very right of the frame, typically exposed and staring explicitly, not necessarily overshadowed by the naked torso to her left.
In On Being an Angel #1 her surroundings are desolate, darkened. She appears to be lying on wooden floorboards, one singular miscellaneous object to her right. The broader works from the On Angels series (1977) also rest upon this sense of desolation in order to heighten the intensity of the sexual character of Woodman’s images. The bleakness of her surroundings marks her form as a kind of visual rapture – a transcendental body composed entirely of dreams, hopes, and desires. As Ken Johnson articulates for The New York Times, Woodman’s images are “dreamy, formally playful and disarmingly erotic” and therefore thoroughly detached from what has been noted as the “pornographic chic” style of fashion photographer Helmut Newton, renowned for his own fashioning of idols out of the nude female form. Instead, Woodman is her own idol. Her “disarming eroticism” is complimented by the sparse quality of setting which makes her sense of self so overtly apparent. Perhaps it should be obvious that Woodman is not necessarily concealing herself in her surroundings but consciously positioning herself within them in order to sharpen the palpably sexual and undeniably subjective quality of her imagery.
Woodman’s later works are an intricate cocktail of all the elements which make her preceding work so intense and violently original. Her work from 1979-1980 offers yet another Untitled image which underlines both the evolution and continuous elements of her style. Woodman can be seen standing to the left of the frame (this impulse to the corners of interiors is noted by art historian George Baker) in which she cuts a sleek figure in a long black dress and almost opaque tights. She adopts a stare which again acknowledges the sexual potential of even her clothed body and is equally filled with disquiet, a sense of danger mimicked by the corpse of a small black animal which hangs to her right (I imagine it to be a fox, the idea of her metaphorical foxiness signified in frame).
Johnson’s astute reading of Woodman’s body of work as “playing out a high-low struggle between innocence and experience, the spiritual and the carnal and the angelic and the demonic” reads as a confirmation of the idea of the expansive, intellectual, and often highly sexual solidity of Woodman’s subjectivity. While her deferral to spiritual images and surreal situations is most often perceived as an abandonment of the ambiguities of the self, it appears at least in her more sexual images that her predilection for such motifs may too be an acknowledgement that the sites of contradiction within the self are also sites of sensuality and play. As Andrea Scott writes, “Woodman’s subject is less the known self than some shape-shifting remnant,” yet the way Woodman permits these shapes to pronounce themselves and consequently coalesce, contradict, and reform confirms both a subjective confidence and a deep, inherently sexual, pleasure.
Bibliography
Images
Cahun, Claude. 1925. Self Portrait.
Ray, Man. 1932. Larmes (Tears).
Woodman, Francesca. 1975-1978. ‘A Woman, A Mirror – A Woman is a Mirror for a Man’.
Woodman, Francesca. 1977. ‘On Being an Angel #1’. Rhode Island.
Woodman, Francesca. 1977. ‘On Angels’.
Woodman, Francesca. 1975-1976. ‘Untitled’. Providence, Rhode Island.
Woodman, Francesca. 1975-1978. ‘Untitled‘. Space2. Providence, Rhode Island.
Woodman, Francesca. 1979-1980. ‘Untitled’.
Texts
Berger, John. 2008. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books
Hessel, Katy. 2023. ‘Pornographic chic’: can Helmut Newton’s sexist nudes really be fixed by gender-switching? August 28. Accessed August 28, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/28/pornographic-chic-helmut-newtons-sexist-nudes-gender-switching-hani-hape.
Johnson, Ken. 2012. Exposing the Body, Baring the Soul. March 15. Accessed August 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/arts/design/francesca-woodman-at-guggenheim-museum.html.
Lively, Penelope. 2006. Moon Tiger. London: Penguin Modern Classics.
Museum, Guggenheim. 2012. Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman (Part 1 of2). May 18. Accessed August 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM3uBw5_voY.
n.d. Look Closer: Finding Francesca. Accessed August 10, 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francesca-woodman-10512/finding-francesca.
n.d. Francesca Woodman. Accessed August 2023. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and- artists/artists/francesca-woodman.
Scott, Andrea K. 2015. A Young Artist as Her Own Ghostly Muse. December 12. Accessed August 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/young-artist-ghostly-muse.
Tellgren, Anna. n.d. Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel. Accessed August 2023. https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/francesca-woodman/.
White, John. 2014. Francesca Woodman: Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island 1975–6. November. Accessed August 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-untitled-providence-rhode-island-ar00347.
Woodman, Francesca. n.d. Francesca Woodman: Work. Accessed August 2023. https://woodmanfoundation.org/francesca/works.
—. 2012. Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman (Part 2 of 2). May 18. Accessed August 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH7OJkYqAPY.
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