The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman

Elizabeth Gumport

George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman: House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Given that her complete catalogue is composed almost entirely of work she produced as a student, the posthumous critical esteem for American photographer Francesca Woodman is astonishing. Unlike music or math, where precocious displays of talent are not uncommon, photography tends not to have prodigies. Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981 at age 22, is considered a rare exception. That she has achieved such status is all the more remarkable considering only a quarter of the approximately 800 images she producedmany of them self-portraitshave ever been seen by the public.

Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of her death, Woodman is having something of a moment. In coming months, her work will be shown by several British galleries, and later this year San Franciscos Museum of Modern Art will mount a major retrospective of her work, the first of its kind in the United States. In 2012, the show will travel to the Guggenheim. The WoodmansC. Scott Williss thoughtful new documentary about the photographer and her familyopened last week at Film Forum in New York.

Taken between 1972 and 1981, Woodmans photographs are almost all black-and-white and have a general softness of focus not often seen these days. They depict a world almost identical to the one captured by earlier generations of photographers, as if Woodmans camera were a filter through which the neon clutter of contemporary life could not pass. Some of these images have the polished smoothness of Surrealist photographs, like those of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer, in which precisely-rendered objects are arranged so deliberately it seems the slightest movement would alter the meaning entirely. (Fluent in Italian, Woodman spent her junior year in Rome, where she paid frequent visits to ! the Libr eria Maldoror, a bookshop-gallery that specialized in work about and by Surrealists, and which ultimately hosted her first small show.) She makes use of many Surrealist motifs, among them mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls. Like Magritte, she often shrouds her subjects in white sheets.

Her concealed figures, however, call to mind corpses, or ghosts, as if the wall between our world and the spirit realm had begun to fall. In her images, dust abounds, and there are no new buildings, only ruins, whose disintegrating forms evoke the wrecks admired by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic revivalists often cited as major influences. The out-of-focus figures are faint and friable-seeming, and Woodmans gray tones as powdery as crumbling stone. To Die, reads the inscription on a Victorian tombstone that appears in one of Woodmans early images, is Gain.

George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman: Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

The phrase is more than apt. What little is known of Woodmans archive has proven itself capable of supporting a monumental reputation, the nude portraits of herself and other young models bearing much of the weight. Since her rediscovery in the mid-1980s, Woodman has continued to attract the attention of audiences and critics. Her work is in the permanent collections of many museumsamong them the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Artand her style has so informed other professional and amateur photographers that effects she pioneered now appear in catalogues and ad campaigns and fashion spreads. She can even be credited with the coining of visual clichs: shots of womens legs, a Woodman favorite, are now considered the adolescents stock in trade.

Born in 1958 to artist-parentsmother Betty Woodman is a ceramicist and sculptor, father George a painter and photographerWoodman was largely unknown during her life! time. He r work was first introduced to the public at a Wellesley College exhibition that opened in 1986, five years after her suicide. At the time, much significance was attached to its apparently autobiographical qualities, which continue to intrigue audiences today. Her death does not simply cast a shadow on the images, but suffuses them with a strange, spectral light, in which everyone looks like Woodmanphotographs of models are frequently mistaken for self-portraitsand facts resemble foresight. The artist seems always to be anticipating her own disappearance. In one of her first genuine self-portraits, which she produced as a boarding school student in the early 1970s, Woodman creeps naked from the forest, eyes closed. In another, taken a few years later, it appears that the roots of a tree on a riverbank are seizing her naked body from the wateror that she is transforming into a tree herself, her pale, flowing hair and slender leg as soft and tentacular as roots. The tree, whose trunk seems to emit a white, alien light, is in a graveyard.

George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman: Untitled, Boulder, Colorado 1976

The same graveyard can be seen in an earlier untitled piece, in which Woodman crawls naked through an opening in a tombstone, her moving body captured on camera as a misty blur, as if she were as insubstantial and inhuman as the air around her. It is the earliest example of the technique that became one of her trademarks: by using slow shutter speeds, she gave her subjects time to move, and on film motion tends to obliterate the thing moving. In later imagesproduced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and afterwards in Italy and Manhattanflesh appears as fog, vapor evaporating or being absorbed by its surroundings. In one 1976 photograph, a girl seems to float, like smoke, inside a fireplace. In another, taken a year later, she melts intoor perhaps emerg! es fromt he wallpaper. Like the early Colorado picture, both are long exposures. Woodman referred to the series as ghost pictures.

George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 19721975

Her first suicide attempt came three years later, in the autumn of 1980. She survived, received psychiatric treatment, and moved in with her parents, who were also living in Manhattan. Early that winter, she published a small book called Some Disordered Interior Geometries. Then a grant application was denied, her bicycle stolen. A romance continued to turn sour. Her parents suspect she stopped taking her medication. On January 19, 1981, she jumped from the roof of a building on the East Side. Nobody at the scene knew Woodmans name, nor did it appear on any of her belongings, and so her body remained unclaimed at the morgue until someone identified her clothes. The fall had rendered her face unrecognizable.

A distinguished television news producer, Willis had never heard of Woodman when he met her parents several years ago, at a brunch hosted by his cousin. Nor had he directed a film: The Woodmans, which was inspired by that chance encounter, is his first, and he keeps its structure simple. Interwoven with Woodmans experimental videos, journal entries, and photographs, some of which have never before been made available to the public, are interviews from which Willis omits himself entirely. We hear and see only Woodmans friends and family, her parents in particularand, in the brief clips Willis culls from her video projects, Woodman herself. Everyone agrees that Woodmans work is too often evaluated in light of her suicide, her ghostly portraits miscast as experiments in self-effacement. Francesca Woodman, a friend says firmly, was not trying to disappear. Willis shows Woodmans footage of a project inspired by an overturned flour truck, the result of which is a black tr! ace of a body, a void surrounded by white dust. We hear Woodmans delighted appraisal: Oh, Im really pleased!

Willis traces Woodmans aesthetic motivations to her childhood in Colorado and in Italy, where the Woodmans had a second home. Wherever the Woodmans were, George says, art was considered serious business. In the mid-1960s, they often hosted visiting artists, among them David Hockney and Richard Serra. Whenever the family visited a museum Woodman and her brother, now a video artist, were provided with sketchbooks, and it was George who gave the teenage Woodman her first camera, the same Yashica 2 x 2 she would use for most of her career. Contemporary footage of Colorado serves briefly as scenic backdrop to the films account of Woodmans youth, and its easy to imagine how the winter landscape worked its silent, icy influence. The frozen world is white and black and gray, and looks like nothing so much as one of Woodmans prints.

In order to avoid making her suicide the climax of the film, which would mean once again presenting it as central to her life and work, Willis frames Woodmans story with that of her parents. The Woodmans begins and ends with Betty and George discussing their own work, in particular a sculpture Betty was commissioned to produce for the American Embassy in Beijing, and whose progress Willis tracks throughout the film. Its installation is at once triumphant and bittersweet. The elder Woodmans often feel their reputations depend on their daughtersas if, as Betty puts it, shes the famous artist and were the famous artists family. George recalls that Woodman killed herself a few days before the opening of his own Guggenheim show.

George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman: Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 19751976

The Woodmans dispenses with the image some may have of the young photographer as a tortured naif, whose suffering was uncorrupted by am! bition o r the desire to do anything besides disappear. Francesca cultivated her reputation and knew, as her friend Betsy Berne wrote, how to play the game. Having artists for parents, one friend informs Willis, made success seem imperative, and obscurity particularly painful. It was necessary, she told her father, to make at least one career-related phone call every day. The process of creating a coherent public image is explored in her journal, where she often referred to herself in the third person. In one 1975 entry, she mentions having shown the journal to a friend. Does it, she writes, read as a book one wonders.

Woodmans interest in self-presentationand self-preservationemerges even in a note written around the time of her first suicide attempt. I finally managed, she explains, to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things. Woodman reverses the traditional terms of the arrangement: death, like photography, is simply a series of chemical reactions. Living is erasing; dying a way of ensuring that what was will continue to be, of fixing certain things in place. When Woodman died, she left behind an unpublished artists book, a set of five images, called Portrait of a Reputation.

But what accounts for the current wave of interest in Woodman? Why do young artists in particular consider her a rock star, as one photography professor puts it in The Woodmans? A note Woodman wrote on the edge of an early print perhaps provides a clue: There is the paper and then there is the person. Self-portraits, once a challenge, are now the easiest kind of image to produce. We just face our laptop and it snaps a picture or records a video. In this position, taking photographs feels exactly like not taking photographs, and being recorded is just like being: we sit back, or type, or wander away. We are increasingly u! nable to register the creation of an image as a particular, contingent event, and many of the pictures we see are as unmemorable as the circumstances in which they were created.

George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman: From Angel series, Rome, 1977

Perhaps this is why Woodman, who produced in her entire life fewer pictures than are uploaded to Facebook every second, has lately been attracting our attention. Her images offer our atrophied organs of perception occasion to exert themselves, forcing us to focus on the moment of their creation. Woodman often planned her pieces far in advance, sketching them as a painter might, and in her journal characterized one of her long exposures as a portrait of legsand time. Her wording recalls a statement issued by early photographer William H. Fox Talbot in the 1830s, when he praised the infant mediums ability to document the injuries of time. He had in mind the comparison of two photographsone old, one new, both of the same subject.

Woodman reveals the injuries that occur in the time it takes to produce a single picture: hair turns wispy, flesh fades and stretches into smoke. The longer her shutter stays open, the blurrier and more transparent bodies will appear, until at last they disappear. Shortly before her death, she began experimenting with a particularly long development process that required her to spend several hours producing a single photograph. In the end, her camera captures not the girl but the long moment it looked at her.

The Woodmans is showing at Film Forum in New York through February 1.