hello I’m from Delaware // (really, I am) (Taken with instagram)
“I am so vain and I am so masochistic — how can they coexist?”
This is something photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1980), famous for her mostly nude self-portraits, wrote in one of her journals.
It’s difficult to articulate the effect her photos have on me. Even if her suicide could be overlooked (a tall order, I’m aware), I believe they would still carry the same weight.
They are, in a word, haunting. There are obviously elements of the surreal. There are often parts of her body — face, the torso column, legs — blurred into the background, so that they become less a focal point and more a ghost of movement. Some compositions border on the grotesque, maintaining a gothic, nightmarish, you-don’t-want-to-know-what’s-locked-in-the-attic quality. But as a counter (or compliment) to that, there is something very real and very raw about her photos. Looking through her work feels voyeuristic (probably the point), not only in the sense of processing her blatant nudity, but perhaps a more personal invasion — feeling as though you’re seeing a mind at work, and more specifically, that you’re seeing an artist’s mind at work, who is specifically trying to work out her own identity. It leaves me feeling as though I’m looking at Woodman’s changing perceptions of herself. It is beyond intimate.
PHOTO/New York Review of Books, “Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman.”
See more of her photography here:
