Francesca Woodman again sends forth her siren call, luring us in to puzzle out this puzzling girl. Only this time her haunting song—by turns enchanting, beguiling, slippery, and dangerous—is transatlantic, arising in both New York City, where Gagosian is celebrating its newly announced representation of the Woodman Family Foundation with the show “Francesca Woodman,” and London, where the National Portrait Gallery features her work in a joint exhibition with the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, “Portraits to Dream In,” opening on March 21.
Woodman was born into a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado. Her father, George, taught at the University of Colorado, and her mother, Betty, was a celebrated ceramist. It was within this intensely creative milieu that the precocious child with prodigious talent was hothoused into artistic understanding way beyond her years. At 13, her father gave her one of his cameras to take to boarding school, where she began taking photographs in earnest and quickly mastered the medium, shooting and, crucially, developing her work.
From 1975 to 1978, Woodman attended the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence; a number of the prints in the Gagosian show were produced in response to school assignments there (others were made after she moved to New York in 1979). But even before she got to Rhode Island, Woodman was producing highly accomplished artworks. She was always striving to be better, and her printing journals, which are part of her vast archive, reveal her observations about her work. It must have been magical to watch the prints develop. Her early death, at 22, was devastating to family and friends, and a loss for art.
Woodman brought together all kinds of ideas and references from art history, including chiaroscuro and iconographic imagery. Transforming one form into another was a preoccupation, and there is a metaphysical quality to her work. She often starred in her photographs, treating her own body as subject, object, sculpture, succubus, ghost. Frequently situated at the heart of the image, Woodman plays peekaboo with the camera, her audience, herself. Questions of presence and absence prevail. Indeed, she embodies the spirit of art-school cool—or perhaps, in a twist, uncool, as she was known to be intense.
The young photographer achieved a “spatio-temporal” isolation in her works. This “anytime, anywhere” sensation allows her images to slip between dimensions and also to fit themselves into various eras in photography’s history; they are not easy to date in real time.
Woodman continues to seek out our attention. Her naked form is irresistible to the gaze, and her confrontational push at the boundaries—that incredible vitality—is barely contained by the paper it’s printed on. She’s the ultimate gothic heroine. Is it so remarkable that a few years after her suicide, in 1981, Woodman was recognized by the art historian Ann Gabhart? With Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Gabhart organized the photographer’s first solo museum show, in 1986, at Wellesley College Museum and Hunter College Art Gallery, bringing art-historical interest to Woodman’s work, and letting her take her place in the canon, where she so clearly belongs.
“Francesca Woodman” is on at Gagosian in New York until April 27. “Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In” opens at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, on March 21
Sarah Hyde is a London-based writer