Working most prolifically between 1975 and 1980, Francesca Woodman left behind a legacy of haunting black-and-white photographs that question notions of female identity, depiction of the female form and the human anatomy, relations between artist and spectator, author and subject, reality and representation...
Woodman's photographs reflect a veritable patchwork of influences ranging from Dada and Surrealism to Gothic Horror, as lone female subjects, often nude, contort their bodies, faces obscured or blurred in motion, in seemingly decrepit or abandoned spaces. However phantasmagorical or unreal the atmospheres created in these photographs are, there is something distinctly anchored in reality about the subjects of Woodman's work (perhaps due the corporeality and tangibility of the nude female figure) which allows for thematic implications that ring true in both an everyday, realist sense as well as on a more metaphysical, spiritual level.
What resonates most for me in Woodman's work is her complete and utter submergence in the artistic process in order to fully explore this idea of female identity. Woodman herself was both photographer and subject in many of her photographs, bearing all both literally and figuratively -- literally in the sense that she presented her naked body to the viewer, figuratively in the sense that once you become object of your own art, there's no backing down: your work is completely personal (really you become your art) and your own problems, vulnerabilities, insecurities, et al. become the very foundation of the artwork which you present to the public to be gawked at and scrutinized.
In fact, even when she wasn't the subject of her own photos, she often employed look-a-likes and doppelgangers who maintained (albeit to a lesser extent) this level of personalization (Now that I think of it, really reminds of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar...) Speaking of Plath-ian undertones, unfortunately, perhaps as a result of this total exertion of herself into her work, Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22. Years after her demise, her work would finally come to be the subject of the attention it deserves, with a number of posthumous books published and exhibitions traveling across the nation. To this day, Woodman's surreal depictions of troubled young females continue to haunt and inspire art critics and plebeians alike -- unsettling, spectral apparitions of the female selfhood that float in and out of the collective consciousness, hovering over us all like Esther Greenwood's Bell Jar.
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