Personal Exposure & Vulnerability- Suicide & Self as Muse- Francesca Woodman

The lens can become a shield to separate one from the world or a doorway for visual expression or vulnerable intimate expression to open up an eye into ones very private world. Perhaps Francesca Woodman used the camera as a diary of dialogue between herself as the photographer as well as the image and model depicted.  Her work is a series of surrealistic self- portraits that I find particularly compelling for many reasons. With all the drama of the archetypal Ophelia, her photographs depict the romanticisized dance of beauty, death, desire, emergence, violence, identity and sexuality.  

I find her work both very personal as well as universal in the female experience of deciphering identity in a post-modern culture.  I also struggle with the irony of sophistication of the entire body of work and the sophomoric nature of the work itself.  These are the photos that every young art student photographer wants to take of herself.  Perhaps that is part of the appeal of Francesca Woodman's work.  Her work has a delicate balance of reverence and beauty of the perfection of the (her) female form as well as self- loathing of one’s (her) imperfections, that is common to the experience of being woman.  These issues of intimacy, worth, beauty, sexuality, have a particular ephemeral nature that are embodied in Francesca Woodman’s work, and are as relevant today as they were when she took these photographs.  The issue of measuring worth in inches pinched at a waistline seem to express the self loathing that has become an ingrained part of the ritual of becoming woman in contemporary western culture.  This expression is powerful because it is so universal yet so personal, and she is revealed through her photographs.

The exploration of female identity and self identity,  exposing oneself through a series of portraits is not an original concept, many people before and after her did this, however, the level of exploration and exposure of both body and psyche are both tender and heavy handed at moments, yet they tell the story of being a woman and issues of identity that all women struggle with.  Many of her photos are clearly about objectification of the female form, and they are excruciatingly honest. Youth and body beautiful is collected, coveted and desired. In the following images of body in the collection case, a specimen, precious yet held apart.

Her self portraits also explore the issue of self-identity, comparison, and the impact of body actions. Her stain of reputation series are violent and tender at the same time.  They have all the impact of a crime scene,  the evidence is there but it is quiet and there is no scary movie music playing in the background to let you know that killer still lurks.  The body lays, as a stain and peaceful sunlight drifts in with dustmotes, the damage has already been done. The woman sits waiting to be discovered, in the first image, she is the body that has been damaged in the second she is the bad little girl who has done something wrong, naked in her woman body and her guilt. 

The following images have a certain self-consiousness of comparison or awareness of aging and difference and a remarkable vulnerability

The portrait of her laying beneath a photogram of silverware at a window ledge, she embodies Ophelia, underwater, the tines of the fork in her fingers, filtered natural light bathes her face as if she is underwater.  archetype of Ophelia in her work is fascinating to me on a very personal level that I will explore a little more in detail here.  Just as a photographer can be  within their images so can a writer be reveled between their words.  My fascination with Francesca Woodman begins with similarities to my mother, both were Colorado Natives, prior to my mother’s death she was planning to begin school at the University Of Colorado in Boulder, where Francesca Woodman would have been a teenager, beginning her photographic explorations into self-portraiture.  Both women were coming of age in the late sixties, early seventies. Each of these women to me is a mystery, in a way they are interchangeable.  My mother, Christine Calza Fowler was born January 1, 1954. Francesca Woodman was born April 4, 1958. They both took their own lives, my mother shot herself in the forehead and Francesca Woodman jumped from a building in New York City. Both probably bled to death. They were respectively 21 and 22 years old at the time of their suicides. They were of the same generation. This is interesting to me because I began to wonder if there was a cult of female suicide, not in the traditional sense as in a cult but perhaps more of a trend or a romance about the Ophelia nature of suicide. I began researching this and of course Silvia Plath was the first to materialize. Her suicide like my mothers, gunshot to the head, like Francesca Woodman's, jumping from a building, was not a cry for help as they often say suicide is. It was a final complete destructive act that had no other doors out. Silvia Plath's suicide was methodical and planned and definite. The night before, she asked the neighbor downstairs when he would be at home, after he had fallen asleep, she left a note by his door that read, Call Dr. Horder." She knew that an au pair was coming at 9 am to help her with the children. She put her children to sleep and completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping babies with wet towels and cloth. She turned the oven on but did not light the pilot light and opened it, and leaned into the oven as far as she could. The gas seeped into the oven, then began to seep into the room, filling her lungs first. As her neighbors slept downstairs and her children slept next door, she gassed herself. The gas began to seep into the floors and walls and by the time the au pair came in the morning the neighbors had begun to smell the gas. The au pair could not get into the apartment.  A workman helped break the door where they found Silvia Plath dead with her head in the oven.  Her children were still sleeping. There is no mistaken attempt in these acts, all three women wanted to die, definitively and decisively and violently. Looking at an image after the fact and putting meaning into it is a dangerous activity and there is no evidence to support that Francesca Woodman's suicide was premeditated in any way.  However, like Silvia Plath's writing and my mother's writing the depression and psychosis that eventually led to their death's centered around an obsession about suicide and the images below to me are violent falling images of death objectified in a beautiful way.  At age 22, January 22, 1980, Francesca Woodman committed suicide by jumping from the window of her apartment on the lower east side and died on the sidewalk in Manhattan.  The following images to me are images that combine both the objectified body and falling, I doubt they are test trials for suicide but I know from my own early 20's that there is a certain romance in death when suffering of learning the width and breadth of your heart and ambitions are too much.  

Francesca Woodman like my mother, like Silvia Plath, revealed herself from her earliest creative expressions, her first photograph was a self portrait at age 13, where she is faceless, all hair and cable knit sweater with the visible cable attaching to the camera, like a lifeline, an umbillical cord, like a tightrope loosly strung.  Silvia Plath began writing at age 11, what remains of my mother's journals start in her late teens, I do not know when she began writing poetry.  The creative life is often rife with depression and sorrow and the feeling of things intensely.  The fertile soil of creative life may not be the fertile soil of a happy life.  The realm of confessional creative work is also the realm that these three women operated in.  As I research these women I come across a poem by Silvia Plath that I have never heard of that makes me have shivers down my spine.  Was my mother aware of this piece of poetry,  if so she never mentioned it to my father.  Am I named after Electra on the Azalea Path? What is the Ophelia like attraction for young women to violent destruction of self? Is the last act of power, of violence a culmination of a lifetime of depression, mental illness, powerlessness, creative unfulfillment or some kind of youthful idea of romantic death, that is not romantic at all.  This is the poem by Silvia Plath

Electra on Azalea Path 

The day you died I went into the dirt, 
Into the lightless hibernaculum 
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering -
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother's heart. 

Small as a doll in my dress of innocence

I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.

Nobody died or withered on that stage.

Everything took place in a durable whiteness.

The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.

I found your name, I found your bones and all

Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence. 

In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead

Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower

Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.

A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.

She uses the lens to become an apparition, a ghost, there seems to be a fascination with the ability of a body, her body to disappear.  Presence and absence, falling and disappearing from the moment.  

   There is also a very obvious exploration of fetish, sexuality in her images, but her's is the solitary experience of sexuality.  Masturbation, or violence seem to be themes in the work that relates to sexuality.  The lover having left the frame either dramatically or brutally in some cases.  The implied drama of these photos seem to reference typical drama of sexual exploration and desire.  In fact this sense of loss or longing seems to be present in all of her work.

There is a very definite Surealist influence on her work,  it has the obvious influences of Man Ray, and the surealist tendency to objectify the female form. 

Her series of bodies in architecture are haunting and sureal.  When I look at them they are portraits of not only a often headless body emerging from walls, struggling in architectural elements,  they also have a desolation and lonliness to them.  The house has long been abandoned and the female body within it seems very alone, ghostlike often.  I feels less like a study of female roles with in the house and more portraits of abandonment or trappings,  These photos are etheral and haunting. A portrait of the secrets held in walls, in what a place remembers after the inhabitants have abandoned it.