Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman took her first self-portrait at the age of thirteen. For the next nine years, until her untimely death at the age of twenty-two, she took more than eight hundred photographs, developing a singular, sophisticated style notable for its original method of framing her own body. This exhibition of thirty small gelatin-silver prints and five rarely seen large-format prints (produced for the artist’s 1978 graduate show at the Rhode Island School of Design) demonstrates Woodman’s signature technique, in which she juxtaposes herself with the faded grandeur of her chosen setting. Architecture and the body forge alliances amid dilapidated buildings in Colorado, Rhode Island, Rome, and New York, where she worked. The performative scenes she constructs seem simultaneously spontaneous and serious—whether bisecting her body with a loose mantelpiece, crouching furtively in a display case, reprising moments drawn from classical religious iconography, or composing abstract arrangements in which materials such as wire and silk are placed next to skin to create a vivid play of surfaces. Woodman’s poses convey the intensity of her actions but also evoke the pressures of human solitude. The five rare prints—part of a series titled “Swan Song”—were rediscovered posthumously by her family and have been conserved and digitally reprinted, preserving the originals’ distressed, rough aesthetic. They constitute a surprising evolution in Woodman’s practice, in sharp contrast to her smaller prints, known for drawing the viewer into a moment of voyeuristic intimacy with the photographer.