I saw The Woodmans last week, which tells the story of photographer Francesca Woodman and her artsy family. It's a great film full of interviews with interesting people. Her parents in particular are straight out of art-type casting, and I think the film very successfully explores their motivations as well as those of Woodman herself. And I guess Woodman's work is having a bit of a revival now, so the film is well timed. The problem for me is Woodman's photography. I just don't get it. In the film it's praised as ahead of its time, revolutionary, revelatory, etc. Sorry but all I see is melodramatic nudes shot in a rundown warehouse. Her work looks like what any self-indulgent young art-school student might submit for a semester's final project. Mildly interesting but far from revolutionary. If someone tried to circulate these photos today I don't think they'd be well received.
Curious to dig deeper, I checked out a few of her books from the library and gave them a good once-over. Meh. I still don't get it. Am I missing something? Any Woodman fans out there? What's the deal with her work? If you think it's good, why?
24 comments:
I'd never heard of Francesca Woodman before this post, but I love her photos immediately.
I don't disagree with your "self-indulgent art-school student" assessment, but there's something more to her photos... something ineffably sad and lost (and real). Even before looking at her Wikipedia page, I could have guessed she took her own life. Maybe it's morbid, or maybe it's self-indulgence on my part, but that sense of loss and being lost is emotionally inviting in kind of a visceral way.
BTW, I'm a long-time reader, first time commenter. Thanks for continuing the blog, I always look forward to reading it!
I think you have to look deep into her soul to understand her art, understand what was going on in her head psychologically and to have actually been there yourself. There is something magical about Francesca Woodman's work and it draws me straight in emotionally and psychologically.
I've always thought it was dull. It was also much emulated in the mid to late 90s when I was in college, which made it annoying. In the midwest in the 90s it was all nudes in dilapidated barns all the time. Or at least it felt that way.
The Online Photographer wrote about her back in February. You might scan Mike's discussion and possibly the comments to get a feel for what some people do and don't see in her work.
I am personally not familiar with her work and was not inspired to seek it out. At a glance, I share your "art student" reaction. (I guess that's ironic since my photography probably lacks even that, and is instead merely generic hobbyist stuff from an "art" perspective).
Thanks for the TOP link. The comments in reaction to that post run about 10:1 in favor of her photos. Of the negative reactions, I particularly like this one by Andrew Molitor:
"...I have to say they all strike me as the same sort of terrible rubbish that students always produce. These are at least FINISHED rather than half-done and then.. doctored in some dumb way, but they still seem to be pretty awful. There was some mastery of technique, but I'm not really seeing any ideas -- at least nothing that's definitely an idea beyond the "gee-whiz nudity and fuzziness." I am willing to believe there might be some ideas I'll see after I look over some more work.
They are the kind of image that, with a little exciting back story and some critical hype, allow the viewer to imbue them with all kinds of subtext. Ooo, she's challenging the very idea of sexuality! Or, maybe she just thinks pictures of naked girls are ever so racy, you know, just like loads of other 19 year olds do.
In the late 1980s I resurrected a disused darkroom at a small liberal arts college in New England, which was then discovered and used by some rather messy wannabee artists. They left this sort of thing all over it, all the time, along with the rest of their mess. To my irritation."
Ouch! But that's the exception. Most comments like Woodman. The generally favorable views seem to jibe with TOP's readership, but they don't explain the widespread embrace of the art establishment. I still don't get it.
I think your "student like work", analysis is spot on Blake. Her work reminds me of a fellow photography student whose final work one semester was a study representing the "seggregation and and suppression of woman through domestic servitude". The whole series depicted a naked woman, in a derelict serice station, wearing rubber gloves.
Geddit? The rubber gloves represented her suppresion although I could never figure out why the service station....
Servicing, Phill, servicing. And if they served gas, then the tight fit of the hard cylinder of the dispenser within the inviting orifice of ... oh dear, no.
As for Woodman, I have nothing to say other than that I wish other Wikipedia contributors would write up a few more photographers who interest me as well as "Woodmanbiographer" wrote hers.
In Woodman's defense, one reason why her photos might seem "student-like" is that most of them were in fact made while she was a student (first in high school, then RISD). I can't think of other examples of student work comprising the bulk of someone's oeuvre.
I have a snide joke about rubber objects and gas stations but it's probably better left unsaid.
Hello, B.
Tell me please, how do you see Woodman's work compared to Diane Arbus? Of course, we should take into account that Diane was fully formed photographer. Franceska is actually just watched the photography as a way to express her inner fears.
I'd have to think that her mystique helps her photographs in a big way. Whenever I run in to something like this I just accept the fact that I'm missing something about it. I'm not receptive to the nuances that some others seem to pick up on.
I haven't watched the movie yet. I have finally looked at whatever of her work is available on a Google Images search, and I am underwhelmed. But her genre of photography is not one I gravitate towards.
As I looked at her photos, I didn't realize that she was shooting in the 70s. I assumed she was somewhat contemporary (shooting in the 80s or 90s). I just read a short, and not terribly good article on her that mentioned that she paved the way for Cindy Sherman, among others. That thought raises a point to consider. Was her work (captivating or not, interesting or not) influential? That might partly account for her status now.
Also, in the article I link to there's a photo of her with a byline that reads Fancesca Woodman - November 15, 2006 while the article itself says she committed suicide in 1981. So perhaps photos of her travel in time? That's note-worthy as well!
I don't understand the 2006 caption. Not only is the date wrong, the photo isn't of her or by her.
About Arbus, I don't see too much similarity to Woodman apart from how they died. Personally I love Arbus' photos. Her natural curiosity about the world and its strange inhabitants comes through strongly in her work.
I think Woodman's work was more concerned with her inner life, and I think it can be tough to make photos in that genre with universal appeal. People like Sommer and Minor White succeeded, but only after years of practice.
I saw the exhibit at SFMOMA. The exhibit took up nearly as much space as the Cartier-Bresson exhibit, and I think this is one of the issues with her work - there are great photographs in there, but so much else. Entire years of HCB's life were represented by one photo, whereas with Woodman there are several from one day. It's a strange type of retrospective that is actually a time capsule for much of the output (retro without perspective).
Blake,
Ditto, she's always been a head scratcher for me. There are a lot of college photography instructors these days that even assign personal nudes as part of the class, or photo students just turn it in any way, but they're all this type of thing...
I realize that she was her parents little darlin', but her work is very pedestrian in that sort of college MFA sort of way. I used to have to hire kids out of college to work in a commercial catalog studio as assistants, and I used to see a lot of this stuff and better.
Without seeing the film, I can't say I know what was going on, but the blanket pushing of this 'lesser light' of photography by possibly forlorn parents looking for an answer to the suicide might have a lot to do with it. It's interesting to note how many people in the gallery industry are sort of behind this thing, while people I consider to be true geniuses, like Vivian Maier, get pooh-poohed by the alleged MFA intelligensia, most likely because they didn't do the discovery, and the discoverer was a naive...
Look forward to seeing the film, unlike the show which is (was?) around a mile or two away. Perhaps, her artist family history (together with her suicide) helped pave the road to posthumous fame, or maybe that she was the first to "empower" her femaleness by taking nudes of herself so prominently in a time when feminism had finally arrived and could identify with a timely tortured artist/icon symbolizing how women suffer at the hands of society at large?
No question about women's continued victimization- as for Ms. Woodman being any kind of major artist of note...
I think she was fairly well known in the 1980s, long before this current revival. As far as I know her parents weren't very instrumental in her earlier rise to fame, at least not directly.
I think her parents helped her mostly by instilling her with strong drive. Woodman was quite ambitious and created a lot of opportunities for herself, and watching the film you can see where that drive comes from. Both her parents are strong artists in their own right, and both approach artmaking as a serious undertaking. It's not some hobby. It's a full-time commitment. But I don't think they were pulling strings for her or anything like that. She was more famous than them even before her death. Before seeing the film I'd never heard of them.
About Maier, I think there was some skepticism at first but by now her work has been pretty widely accepted. It'll take some time but my guess is it'll eventually join the canon. Or maybe I'm totally misreading the situation.
Yes, definitely the cult figure in the '80s...
Blake, here is my take on it-
A few years ago it was almost impossible to see her work online. That has changed now. Personally I see her work as very simple and I don't read anything deeper into it other than she made some aesthetically pretty pictures. People will ascribe what they want to them based on how they feel about her and her life. The images have what I think is an almost perfect cocktail that results in their popularity/salability. Off the top of my head-
1- She was young and good looking.
2- She shot herself, and her young friends, nude. A lot.
3- She got around, i.e. traveled. Rolling stone appeal.
4- She died young.
5- She committed suicide, tragically of course.
6- She was competent enough with the camera and made some good images. Although if her images were a little better technically they wouldn't lend themselves to the romanticism that surrounds her life and work.
And there you go..... The art world does the rest. Easy sell. Take away any of these factors and we might not know who she was. For example, if she and her friends were ugly? Oblivion.
The Ryan McGinley of her day?
You are assuming of course that McGinley would do the world a favor and join her.
I'm not a huge McGinley fan but it seems outrageous to wish for someone's death.
Can we go back to discussing rubber gloves and gas stations?
Best joke I heard all day.
I'll never be a Woodman fan, but I'd never picture her laughing all the way to the bank either.
I suppose you could enjoin her to McGinley in the "young and beautiful" way, but their work is very different. McGinley is all about the promise of "the beautiful life" of promiscuous sex with beautiful skinny people. In comparison to Woodman's friends, McGinley's "friends" are sought out and aren't exactly his friends. He would know when their birthday is for example only by checking the model release. There is nothing personal about them which is why they seem vapid and superficial. They really don't say much about McGinley either, or maybe they say too much. I guess compared to all of that, Woodman's images are more personal and therefore more compelling. I actually never thought much of Woodman before this, but by your mentioning McGinley she just jumped a step in my mind. Funny how the world sorts itself that way. I still don't believe she is all that interesting though. She possibly could have been, but we will never know.
You're right that McGinley is quite different than Woodman. I guess my analogy was just referring to the first three items:
1- She was young and good looking.
2- She shot herself, and her young friends, nude. A lot.
3- She got around, i.e. traveled. Rolling stone appeal.
After that the comparison breaks down.
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