Francesca Woodman is not a household name among photographers. For those interested in art of self photography as well as fine art personal nude portraits, Francesca Woodman is someone you could draw a lot of inspiration from. She photographed herself, mostly indoors, clothed as well as nude, making pictures that are simple and personal yet strongly motivated by a very intimate sense of humility.
Francesca Woodman’s self images are intimate & many are self nudes. But unlike how most photographers do their self portraitures, Francesca took a very unique approach to her’s. In one large section of her intimate self portraits, she has obscured her through movements & making it more intuitive & pictorial.
Another prominent set of intimate self portraits, often nude portraits of herself, was done in a way in which obscurity was coupled with some amount of drama & curiosity by either movement or hiding part of herself behind walls & objects. When most self portraits by photographers are direct shots, Francesca Woodman’s approach in this aspect appears to be very unique.
Francesca Woodman was born to a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado in 1958 & died by suicide at the age of 22 in 1981. She started taking pictures from a very young age & by the time she was 13 Francesca started to make these intimate self portraits. Most of her work was produced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
Many of her images also contain elements of surrealism, created by movement & long exposures. While some evoke this sense of intrigue & despair though the simplicity of the composition & the location that she chose.
Many of her intimate nude portraits play well with light & shadows. We have done several fine arts projects based on this very theme from Francesca Woodman’s personal nude portraits.
Among some of her exhibited work, were a series of self-portraits with eels, taken in Italy in the late 1970s. Some of these were featured in an exhibition called “Fish calendar – 6 days” & the story of her shopping for these fish & making the pictures are here.
A series of 7 photographs donated in November 1977 by Francesca Woodman to Giuseppe Casetti. The work develops as a story in images, a six-day photographic diary, from 1 to 6 March. The photos were taken in the Roman apartment of FW, in Via dei Coronari. The three lemons identify the third month of the year, while the six garfish that subsequently enter the scene (purchased by Francesca Woodman at the old Roman market in Piazza Vittorio) each represent a different day. The interest and value of these seven vintage prints is enhanced by the fact that some negatives in the series are lost.
If one has to look back & find any meaning behind these surrealistic, often morbid, often obscured by movement or shadows, one might get a sense of a raging fire inside the artist, finding its way out though these self portraits. An evocation of the unnamed, a prayer to the desperation & possibly the futility of it all.
Her suicide, her father thinks, was caused by trauma of failure & an unsuccessful career in art. She had been in therapy for depression, caused by failed relationship & her inability to draw attention from people towards her artwork. She committed suicide by jumping out of her apartment window in New York City.
Art critics have never been pleasant or kind to her. Even after her death, while her intimate self nudes & surrealist self portraits can be very relevant to artists in similar diaspora, only about 120 images from a collection of about 800 prints have been published so far. However, she would continue to inspire some, like she did with us, through her genuineness, intimacy & her fight to keep her art alive.