The Missouri Review

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As a teenager Francesca Woodman started keeping a journal. She filled old ledgers with her scratchy handwriting about the minutiae of her daily life composed in a restless, excited style. Her "pirouettes of speech" were fashioned after her favorite Modernist poet, Gertrude Stein. She carried her pages of "Steinwriting," as she called it, with her everywhere in an oversized bag. She enjoyed playing with language, perhaps as much as she did experimenting with the properties and limitations of photography. The yellowed pages of her journals are filled with oddly turned phrases: "just-breath summer," "sand thoughts all from the sea" and "I get immersed in fog and grey monotones."

Sometimes writing in her journals in third person, "Francesca" extols her love of food and cookbooks, fancy used-clothes stores, sleep, the ocean, Victorian novels and her current romantic interest. More frequently she recounts her artistic failures and successes. Her attitude toward her photography is dire, urgent, passionate but also full of self-doubt and insecurity. She worries that she isn't getting [End Page 80]

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enough work done, that it's not good enough and that her technical skill is lacking—the typical concerns of a dedicated, determined artist. The finest moments are when she reveals her inventive spirit. Many of the entries are notes on photos she plans to stage. In 1973 in her journal dated August 9 she writes, "I think when I get home I should take pictures of objects: purse, hand, etc. 'clues to a lost woman.'"

Since Francesca's suicide in January 1981 at twenty-two, admirers of her photography have sought answers to her sudden, tragic death in the details of her eight hundred black-and-white prints, mostly self-portraits. Why would someone so young, talented and beautiful take her own life? The fact that an audience continues to ask questions about her life and art nearly thirty years later speaks to her work's powerful capacity to evoke emotions and curiosity. "Hypnotic," "ethereal," "ephemeral," "enigmatic," "haunting," "luminescent," "liminal," "infinite" are words often used to describe her oeuvre.

To scour Francesca's pictures for biographical insight would be to miss the performative nature of her work, the playing-dress-up quality of it all. Woodman took pleasure in the theatrical staging of her photos; she placed herself, often nude, at the center of a scene. She knew exactly the effect she wanted to create in her constructed images and the parts she wanted to play. In her studies of the female body she sometimes adopts the guise of a grown woman posing provocatively in antique lingerie or silk slips, while at other times she is a demure girl in a cotton floral dress and Mary Janes. The pictures are haunting, Francesca materializing and dematerializing like an apparition. Often she seems to dissolve into the mise en scène of her photographs: a magician's expert disappearing act among stained, peeling walls of decaying interiors. Always there is a felt presence in her absence as she explores the slippery nature of reality.

Indulging her love of the Gothic, she dressed in vintage frocks and posed in abandoned buildings and houses strewn with secondhand furniture, quilts, mirrors and glass shards, odd bits of sculptures, animal furs and plants, or in cemeteries among sinking mausoleums and headstones. Through careful arrangement and optical trickery, her face is frequently [End Page 82]

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blurred or obscured, her body a shrinking presence in a darkened corner, or she's erased completely by brilliant rays of sunlight. She also likes to edge out of the frame, leaving only fragments of herself behind. Whether this is suggestive of...