Research Task – Francesca Woodman

Part 3 introduces us to Francesca Woodman, an American photographer whose work extensively incorporated self-portraiture.  This is not the first time that Woodman has been discussed since beginning this degree course.  In Expressing Your Vision, she was introduced to me during the feedback on assignment 5 [1] because my theme had been self-portraiture.  She was interesting to me because she used her body, often nude, as a contextual element in a broader story without really making the literal connection with the viewer that it was self-portraiture.  Her story was tragic, committing suicide in her early twenties which has been the external context that many people have used since to explain her photographs.   In the course notes, we are presented with S Bright’s quotation:

“It is difficult not to read Woodman’s many self-portraits – she produced over five hundred during her short lifetime – as alluding to a troubled state of mind.  She committed suicide at the age of twenty-two”

In my previous work, I raised the question of whether this common interpretation was accurate.  Woodman’s parents have subsequently denied that she was a consistently sad person [2], which seems at odds with her premature death.  However, mania is now a more recognised mental illness that affect millions of people worldwide (some 46m cases alone in 2017)[3].   If we separate Woodman’s suicide and perception of her mental state from her work and try not to use it as contextual information, her photographs for me take on a different feeling.    Consider the two images below:

Here we have one of Woodman’s nudes, shot in an abandoned house in Providence where she frequently worked.  The unusual composition focuses on the imprint of a body in the dust on the floor, which is clearly female and assumed to be the artist; an actual figure is seen in the top right hand corner of the frame.  For me, the image describes the fleeting trace of a woman in a place where the slow passage of time is clear.  The inclusion of the actual figure suggests observing the impact that one makes on the world in a physical sense while the brightly exposed dust contrasting with the imprint suggests conflict between us and our environment.  The fact that the figure is that of a nude woman further emphasises the contrast by introducing beauty but also vulnerability in the pose.  For me, as a photograph on its own this doesn’t lend itself to Bright’s analysis of Woodman’s mental state but does suggest that she saw human life and that of femininity to be fleeting when compared to the environment around us.

This image for me does support the statement made by Bright.  Here we have the artist kneeling over a mirror looking up into the camera.  She is nude from the waist down and at first glance, this photograph has an erotic sense to it.  The young woman kneeling in an almost yogic pose in a way that would normally result in us seeing her nudity reflected in the glass.  However, her arm obscures any view of her which creates a sense of playfulness and almost teasing.  It’s when we look into Woodman’s eyes that the narrative changes.  Her expression for me is one of sad resignation rather than erotic invitation.  For me, the image tells the story of the way that Woodman feels that people look at her.  There is an intrusiveness to the pose with very little to hide her modesty.  The position of her hands and knees is more submission than eroticism and the way that she looks at the camera suggests someone who is suffering from the feelings of being exposed.   Mirrors featured heavily in Woodman’s work (I looked at another image in EYV that suggested that she had a view of herself that contrasted with how others saw her).  To this end, what I take from this image is a relationship to Woodman’s fragility even when I try to ignore the knowledge of her tragic demise.  This remains one of my favourite of her images, perhaps because it sums up a struggle with mental illness and self-perception with a combination of subtle and conflicting contextual references.

In terms of supporting evidence of Bright’s comment, I think that the retrospective analysis of her work after her death has done a great deal to drive the narrative of her life.  Her photographs range from the playful (Me and my Roommate, Boulder, 1976) to the darker Untitled, Rome, 1977-78 in which she is shown hanging from a door frame in a crucifixion pose.  Her images suggest contrast between young and old, beauty and ugliness and to feminine exploitation, but if we didn’t know how her life ended I’m not convinced that we can interpret her as disturbed without that external context.

Elina Brotherus

The work of Elina Brotherus takes as similar form to Woodman’s in that she frequently uses her nude body as a contextual element in her photographs.   In her work Model Studies, she builds a series of photographs that explore the relationship between the artist and the model as two separate people, despite her being in both roles.  She uses light, colour and the natural world to draw the viewer in to looking more thoughtfully at her body and how it relates to her environment.  Like Woodman, she uses long exposure and contrasts her subject from the background using mirrors and other props.  What I immediately noticed about the series was the lack of actual contact between artist and model; even in the shots where she is looking at the camera, there is no obvious connection.  Brotherus herself refers to it on her website[6], claiming the detachment to be inviting the viewer to look on the figure without anything that could be interpreted as confrontational.  The series is beautifully shot with the themes of ‘everyday beauty’ and vulnerability standing out for me.  There is also a humour in several of the images, where the single physical connection between artist and model is the remote trigger cable for her camera.  Rather than trying to hide it, Brotherus reminds the viewer that she is both people.

The second series we are directed to is Annunciation, which is much more like the storytelling that we’ve looked at so far.  It tells the story of the Brotherus’ unsuccessful attempts at becoming pregnant through IVF treatment.  This is a tragic series, dominated by images of Brotherus and her partner seemingly waiting for good news that looks unlikely to come.  A combination of empty spaces with Brotherus staring blankly into space, create the sense of loneliness and isolation, but not just for her but also her partner who appears as a helpless actor in the story.  The series blends other context too in the form of a calendar for 2008, a message note left on a blank wall and a collection of rubber bath ducks signifying parents and a child.   One of the most powerful images for me is also one of the simplest.

Here we have Brotherus clearly very upset, looking away from the camera as if to someone else in the room.  This photograph actually made me cry as the contextual elements and its position in the series reinforce the utter frustration and sadness that often accompanies something like fertility treatment.  Her nudity suggests a woman desperate to be a mother and the absence of a child in the image, which would tend to a more conventional visual of motherhood is for me, the most powerful part of the photograph.  The combination of her expression and tears asks “why me?” and suggests clearly that the news has been bad.  I loved this series for the linear and non-linear elements to the story-telling.  The use of props along with her relationship work perfectly.   Brotherus followed up this series with another called Carpe Fucking Diem in 2016.  This story documents her realisation and acceptance that she would not become a mother.  Her photographs for this series tackle the themes of life going on, the natural attempts to improve fertility and the realisation that it’s a futile effort as well as a defiant lashing out at the rest of the world who seemingly can have children.  She uses strong metaphors like a snow-covered children’s horse ride and a bowl of rotten tomatoes that invoke a sense of finality to both the dream and the biology.  She uses her partner again, but this time including a child substitute in the form of a small puppy.    While this work still has a sadness, it’s title and some of the more defiant images describe someone who is regaining strength and humour after this miserable series of events.  My favourite image of the collection is shown below:

This image shows a defiant Brotherus who, by her own admission abandoned the preconception of having to act like an adult following her unsuccessful attempts to become a mother.  Her expression and gesture as well as the title, inject a dark humour to the image, which is included towards the end of the series and part of her re-evaluation of the future.

Gillian Wearing

The final artist presented in Project 1 is Gillian Wearing.  Her series Album is a remarkable piece of work whose origins may be in photography in terms of the reference images, but the execution also incorporates sculpture.  Wearing used reference photographs from her family album to create latex masks.  She then used the masks to ‘become’ her family members, photographing herself in similar poses to the original.  What is special for me about this work, apart from the technical challenge, is the way that Wearing connects with her family.  The study of historical pictures and then the painstaking act of ‘becoming’ points strongly to how our families are the origins of who we are.  By deliberately leaving traces in the photographs that indicate that it is her, Wearing plays on the viewer’s double-take and subsequent questioning about genetic similarity.  My favourite from the series is described in an interview Wearing gave to The Guardian[9] where she ‘became’ her brother using a snapshot from their growing up. The double take is even stronger with the conflict of gender as well as the carefully staged setting making it difficult to age the photograph.

It resonated with me because of the strong family resemblance between my father and I, which I’ve been reminded of throughout my life.  That reminder had a variety of impacts and reactions through my growing up, ranging from not understanding through teenage resentment to more recent pride in my later life.  The thing that struck me about the telltale signs in Wearing’s photograph is the fact that while we look like and are shaped by our families, we are not copies of them.  I tried to capture this in Assignment 5 of EYV with the image below:

Conclusion

This project has dealt with the works of three very different artists.  Woodman and Brotherus share some similarities at face value, but Brotherus’ work feels more of a focused set of stories that are perhaps more obvious than Woodman’s.   Woodman has been associated with physical and mental frailty in some quarters and strong feminist expression in others, but we cannot really be certain of her intention for her art.

“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner?” – Francesca Woodman

When I first read this quote, my immediate reaction was that it was a deliberately obscure explanation of her intent, leaving the viewer with any interpretation that they wished for.  We know that too much space to create narrative can be problematic in the appreciation of the photograph, so why even say it?  On reflection, I think that Woodman was actually being all of those things at the same time.  Perhaps her emotional state oscillated between these self-images; we will never really know.  With Brotherus, her projects feel much more signposted without the narrative being spoiled by the more obvious contextual elements.  She uses her body very deliberately in a completely non-sexual and non-sensual way, something that cannot be said about some of Woodman’s work.  Brotherus is the central element of her stories, but using her body and sense of self-image as a mere tool to strengthen the feelings around the subject.  It is rare for an image to prove a tearful response in me, but the shot from Annunciation did just that.

In contrast to the other two, Wearing’s series was using the sense of self but also disguise.  Her strong connection to her family is reinforced by the dedication shown to create the photographs, while the questions raised about family genetics and how people are shaped by their growing up are also powerful.

There are definitely some interesting perspectives here that will help with my preparation for Assignment 3.

References

[1] Fletcher R, 2020, “Looking at Contemporary Portrait Artists”, EYV Blog Post, https://wordpress.com/post/richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/1420

[2] Cooke R, 2014, “Searching for the real Francesca Woodman”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman

[3] Ritchie H & Roser M, 2018, “Mental Health”, Our World in Data webpage, https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health

[4] Johnson K, 2012, “Exposing the Body, Baring the Soul”, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/arts/design/francesca-woodman-at-guggenheim-museum.html

[5] Artist Profile, 2016, “Francesca Woodman”, ND Magazine, http://ndmagazine.net/photographer/francesca-woodman/

[6] Brotherus E, 2008, “Model Studies”, Artist Website,  http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography#/model-studies/

[7] Brotherus E, 2012, “Annunciation”, Artist Website, http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography#/annonciation/

[8] Brotherus, E, 2016, “Carpe Fucking Diem”, Artist Website, http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography#/carpe-fucking-diem/

[9] Unknown, 2012, “Gillian Wearing takeover:behind the mask – the self-portraits, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/mar/27/gillian-wearing-takeover-mask