On being an angel...

"Woodman's pictures are not de-constructive, but constructive. She added layers of reflection and mimicry within the photograph to confound the transparent recording of the real. The images become psychological portraits of the identity of the body, rather than identifying physical portraits that reveal the psyche."

Hixon

Francesca Woodman has created only the small number of 500 photographs and she is considered to be one of the most influential photographers of our times. She was born in Denver in 1958 and studied at Rhode Island School of Design .Her first exhibition was in Britain and incorporated photos that she took when she was only 13 years old.

She developed an interest on the female body and on the three dimensional world and how people relate to space. She takes photos of herself and her body becomes a tool that enables her to explore the world. Her body is the self, the object and the subject. She is depicting her body becoming the wall, part of the floor or sealed behind a glass and blend with the objects that surround her. She explores human boundaries and specifically explores existence and disappearance, life and death. Her portraits were sensual, violent and certainly haunting. She is exploring passionately her gender and sexuality. In her photos she did not deconstruct reality rather incorporated different levels of reality. She is creating images were you can sense a dialog between herself and her body. She is using symbols and explores the transitory experience of space.

Her photographs are self portraits that definitely communicate her inner feelings through image dialogs. She is often nude in her portraits and alone. When she is not nude she is wearing vintage clothing something that she loved wearing. The setting of her photos is usually a large empty room, a cold dark place that has old furniture. She is a beautiful and gifted young woman that received brilliant critics concerning her work and started a prospering career at a young age.

However, at the age of 22 she threw herself out of the window from her flat in New York just after publishing her first book. She published only one work that was called “Some Disordered Interior Geometries”. Critics started discussing the suicidal signs that were depicted on her photos because her portraits had incorporated a psychological view of her existence. At the same time though, her photos were playful, experimental and sensual. What made Woodman an influential artist was not the way of her death rather than her life’s work. She became influential for her experimental and innovative perspective. She is an artist and a woman worth discovering.

Art:F.Woodman
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