ウッドマンの写真を初めてテートモダンのコレクションで見た時は結構、戦慄が走った。７０年代の写真家であるが、非常に現代的に見えたし、それに何より、こんな強いセルフポートレートが彼女の写真の大半を占めているスタイルにビビッと来た。カメラマンとしては久しぶりにヒットした。ナンゴールデン以来です。気づいたら非常に長い事見とれてて、ちょっと正気に返って、紹介文とかよんでみたら、彼女は１３歳で写真家としてのキャリアをスタートし、２２歳、ニューヨークの彼女のスタジオの窓から飛び降りてなくなった事を知って、さらに衝撃が走った。確かに全てモノクロのセルフポートレイト群はアラーキーに言わせるところのタナトス（死への衝動、逆はエロス）がめちゃくちゃみなぎっている。
シンディー・シャーマンを彷彿させると思っていたら、パリに帰ってきて、ネットで色々調べていくうちにやはりそういう文脈があるみたい。ウッドマンの方が先駆で、演劇的なセルフポートレイトで現実と虚構を行き来するシャーマンより、実際的な人間（ここではウッドマン本人の）メンタルとフィジカルの表象（body&soul）を行き来している。メンタルとは、具体的には’ラブ’やセクシャリティー。当時のフェミニズムの文脈とも関係がないわけではないです。彼女の若さが非常にポジティブに表現と結びついて（結びつきすぎて死んでしまうんだけど‥‥‥。）性やセックス、異性との距離感が自身の体を通して表されるのです。シュールリアリスティックな印象を誰もが抱くが、シュールリアリスムのブリコラージュよりもっと直接的なスーパーインポーズを多用してます（野菜、秋刀魚、鰻‥‥？）。シュールリアリスムは、刹那的な衝動で作品が作られたのに対して、woodmanは一貫してテーマが定まっており表現も丹念に積み重ねており、資本主義的な社会や機械が生んだ前者に対して、より人間的で一般的に誰でも抱える個人的な悩みのようなものが作品を生んでます。だから、マン・レイや、シャーマンより、僕個人的には温かみを感じて共感を覚えました。勿論マン・レイとかシャーマンとかもめちゃくちゃ好きだけど。とにかく超僕好みです。結局、身体性ではなく「愛」や「恋」を照射するための身体性のイメージ、メタ身体性の発見が行われたのです。長時間露出でwoodmanの体はぼやけます。これは曖昧な恋心が照射された身体でもあるのです。深読みを敢えてするなら、希薄な生の欲求、死のイメージでもあったのでしょう。
いろんな文章の抜粋Woodman played complex games of hide-and-seek with her camera. Constructing enigmas that trap our gaze, her work conjures the precarious moment between adolescence and adulthood, between presence and absence. She depicts herself seemingly fading into a flat plane, merging with the wall under the peeling wallpaper, dissolving into the floor, or flattening herself behind shards of glass. Fascinated by transformation and the permeability of seemingly fixed boundaries, Woodman constantly compares the fragility of her own body with the physical environment around her. Her images read as a diary–sharing both her imagination and her body.
the influences of gothic literature, surrealism, feminism and post-minimalist art on Woodman’s photographs.
Art critic Arthur Danto said of Woodman’s photographs, “It is impossible to view her work without being drawn into the vast questions it raises about life, art and the meaning and embodiment of sex. . . . Her work unfolds over time like the oeuvre of a brilliant and precocious poet, like Keats or Rimbaud, whose voice is present in every line.”
They cause the same kind of confusion that’s so common when we speak about love: the ambiguity only increases with the strength of the feelings involved. In these pictures ambiguity reigns sovereign, fruit of the artist’s respect for her inner world and her curiosity concerning a fragmentary but strong-felt reality.
Now that some years have passed, it’s strange to consider that at a time when photography and art shared the same interest in what we called “de-constructionism” Woodman preferred to construct her scenes by superimposing various levels of the real rather than breaking down reality to study the image’s constructive mechanisms.
The influence of surrealism must also be considered for its interpretations of the female body, which represented a break with traditional models of representation. But even in this case, it would be risky to look for influences which, in the long run, might not hold much water. If surrealism sublimated the chance events, Woodman’s photographs seem to be a complex of combinations, a space for the transitory, for change, but her work has little or nothing to do with the idea of improvisation.
Woodman was photographer and model, subject and object, at the same time. She utilized the female body to develop her own self-knowledge and not some representative but generic model of the world. The images of the body that this young American was experimenting with suggest a diffuse intimacy while tending to dissuade a voyeuristic approach. Unlike most of the images we are faced with on a daily basis, where the body is treated like a commodity to be used and consumed, or an icon to adore at safe distance, Francesca Woodman employs her body to initiate a dialog with herself. She places her body in familiar settings, though at the limits of our experience, presenting it as a symbol of receptivity, a meeting place between herself and the rest of the world, a communicative model in which information about her experience is presented and reflected upon. She uses her own body as a model to investigate her own vision and not another’s vision of her body. Woodman projects images and symbols, hopes and fears onto the female body. She uses it like a gesticulative vector not fully known to her, communicating to the viewer the novelty of her encounter.
Art critic Kathryn Hixon wrote in her essay “Essential Magic” (Zurich, 1992): “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.”To mention the psychological component is very important in the analysis of Woodman’s oeuvre. The symbolic reconstruction of reality, without doubt, can be considered as a mechanism in the recognition/awareness of reality itself. It’s as though the artist were researching into the formation of her own personality by exhibiting— sometimes even in the photographs themselves — her impulses, reflections, vulnerability, her awareness of the moment, and the horror of sudden absence.
Like Plath, Woodman devoted herself to the exploration of the visible landscape of her body and its invisible counterpart, her psyche.
Woodman asks others: What are the boundaries between our bodies and our images of bodies? Between our selves and our reflections? How could a man this alive ever disappear? Suddenly, what first appeared to be simply a series of cheerful snapshots becomes a row of gray windows, each granting a vertiginous glimpse into the canyons of life and death.
Or perhaps I should say life-in-death, since in Woodman’s work, the two realms are constantly intruding on one another. Even in her earliest images, Woodman was fascinated with the ways in which the human body could be made to seem an apparition. 〜
By using a slow exposure speed, she turned that person’s body into a blur, even as she rendered the world around it crisp and clear. Woodman went on to use this technique throughout her life, photographing herself jumping, bending, waving, and stretching, usually in near-empty rooms.
In retrospect, one can also see her work presaging the theatrical self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, or even the juvenile dramas Sally Mann composed of her children.
and David Levi Strauss examines Woodman’s debt to surrealism. Despite their occasionally critical intent, these essays ultimately grant more weight to Woodman’s biography than to her artistic heritage, and to that extent they underestimate her achievement.
