Lost (and Found) Artist Series: The Haunting Self-Portraits of Francesca Woodman

Artland’s Lost (and Found) Artist Series focuses on artists who were originally omitted from the mainstream art canon or were largely invisible for most of their careers.
This week, we feature Francesca Stern Woodman, a prolific female photographer born in Denver, Colorado, in 1958. She is best known for her black and white self-portraits and her intriguing photographic depiction of the female figure featuring either herself or female models. Woodman had a sophisticated understanding of photography and extensively experimented with slow shutter speed, producing long exposures with blurry and ghost- or angel-like subjects, capturing the naked or sensitively-clothed female body merging with their surroundings. Throughout her short life, Francesca Woodman lived and worked in Boulder, Colorado; Providence, Rhode Island; Rome, Italy; and in New York City.

The tragic life and formidable career of Francesca Woodman

The young Francesca Woodman first started taking photographs in her early teens while at boarding school. She grew up in an artist family and living with art was a natural part of her life since early childhood. Her mother Betty was a ceramicist and sculptor, while her father George was a painter and also a photographer. The Woodman’s home was often visited by great artists of the time like David Hockney and Richard Serra. At the age of 13 in 1972 Francesca began to take photography classes during high school at the Abbott Academy to nurture her already blooming interest in photography. Woodman attended the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975 for three years, which proved to be the most fruitful period of her life. After her graduation in 1978, she went to live in Rome for a whole year, as part of the School of Design’s Rome Honors Program. In 1979 she moved to New York city, where first she dedicated her time to capture indoor photographs at her studio.

In New York she became interested in fashion photography, however, what appears as iconic in her aesthetics and composition nowadays, was mostly rejected at the time. Despite hardships to pursue a career as an artist and the competitive nature of the 1970s and 1980s New York art scene, she was invited for an artist residency at The MacDowell Colony in 1980. At the beginning of 1981, she witnessed the publication of one of her notebooks that she had been working on since 1976 in the form of a book entitled Some Disordered Interior Geometries. Her family and peers did not consider her to be depressed; however, the lack of attention to her work and unhappy romances left her troubled. Her unsuccessful portfolio submissions to fashion companies and a failed application for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts drove Woodman to commit suicide, jumping out of the Barbizon building, not far from her Manhattan apartment.

In spite of her tragically early death at the age of 22, she produced an impressive ten thousand negatives and created over 800 untitled prints as well as making numerous experimental videotapes before taking her own life. Her oeuvre has been shown in a number of major exhibitions in recent years and her tragic life story and struggle for fame in the art world is recounted in the biography Francesca Woodman by Chris Townsend as well as in the 2010 film documentary, The Woodmans. Today, the Woodman Family Foundation oversees her artistic legacy as well as stewards the estate of her parents, Betty and George Woodman.