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It has now been 35 years since the death of Francesca Woodman, but interest in her and in the photographs she left behind—a radical, extraordinary, but abbreviated body of work that at first glance was all about the body—has never waned. In fact, every year or so, another strong wave hits, in the form of a new book, a new exhibit, a film, or another prominent admirer, as subsequent generations and audiences discover anew her mostly black-and-white, alluringly obscured images. Small and intimate and startling, they draw you close. Sometimes the pictures are of girl models who resembled her, nude or clothed; sometimes Woodman poses with a male model—a corpulent older man identified as Charlie; but usually, the image is of the photographer herself, alone with her camera, shutter left open to record her deliberately long exposure, plotting out her beautiful, spooky blurs, zigzagging in and out of the frame, disappearing into the tombstones and fireplaces and wallpaper and corners of abandoned-looking rooms, and presumably out of the world forever, as Woodman did, killing herself at age 22.
In 2010 came The Woodmans, a documentary whose true subject was the artist’s parents, also artists (Betty is a ceramicist; George is a painter who turned to photography after his daughter’s death); it was a portrait of a family devoted to and organized entirely around the largely solitary process of making creative work. In 2012, the Guggenheim mounted the first major American survey of Woodman’s work. New catalogs and books arrive from all over the world every few years, including reproductions of Woodman’s exercise notebooks, elaborately sketching and planning the photographs she made while living at home with her parents in Boulder, Colorado, and in Rome; as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design; as a very young artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire; and in her first years in New York City. Woodman’s life was wrapped up in her art, and in that sense, she lived intensely and burned brightly, leaving behind some 800 works. While a remarkably prolific number given her age, it is not, for prospective curators and publishers, a bottomless well. And so the arrival today of another new title, Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel, which begs the question: Why do we need a new book about Francesca Woodman now?
Elegant and compact, accompanying a traveling exhibition, it is not a comprehensive monograph, nor does it shed any real new critical perspective—for that, look to 2014’s Francesca Woodman: Works From the Sammlung Verbund, which also includes excellent essays on Woodman’s life and work. The text worth reading in On Being an Angel is by Woodman’s father; otherwise, skip the essays and focus instead on what the book delivers, and beautifully so: the opportunity to have a close, largely unmediated experience with the photographs themselves, scaled to the actual size of the mostly 5-by-5-inch dimensions. The images may be largely familiar to Woodman fans—her white-hot angels, her polka dot–patterned dresses, her girls in bathtubs, her graveyards, her cursive caption scrawling across the surfaces—but now they practically fit in your hand.
You see again how the pictures evoke the moody quality of a Duane Michals photograph; the stylish composition of Woodman’s hero, the fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville; and early spiritualist photographs, in which ghosts accidentally enter the frame. But Woodman’s ghosts were perfectly calculated. Like a mythic Daphne, she wraps herself in the discarded birch bark of the trees that still proliferate in the woods of the MacDowell Colony; she pulls her hair; she hangs from the door jamb; she flies out the window, an eerie blur in her wake—portraits of her liminal self. Given her end, it’s tempting to focus on the haunting, mortal qualities in Woodman’s work the way it is tempting to do with any artist who dies at the height of his or her power. From the moment news spread of David Bowie’s death, for instance, came the scouring of Blackstar for clues. Woodman chose her hour and worked her way to it. Bowie, aware of his, chose to make its approach into art. And because Woodman died so young, at her own hand, and as a woman, she has tended to be characterized as a Sylvia Plath figure, gothic and depressed. Clearly, at many points, she was. But looking up close, you suspect there was a lot more to Francesca Woodman, and what this reproduction of her photographs offers is a personal experience with the work, visceral and dynamic and enigmatic and passionate, and you also suspect, deeply ironic and funny.
“Francesca was a genuine nut, the good kind,” began the writer Betsy Berne, Woodman’s best friend from art school, in an essay that was included in the 2014 book—one I wish was reprinted in this new edition. Hers are the words you want in your head when you revisit these photographs, a wisely considered, deeply felt, and delightfully Just Kids–esque account of their early days in New York in 1979; their thrift shop clothes; their diner and coffee shop dates; their twice-daily phone calls; their talks about art, crushes, Eva Hesse.
“I often wonder what Francesca would have made of today’s art world,” Berne writes. “No doubt she would have achieved success (whatever that means). No doubt she would have gone along with the critics’ rhetoric and the quasi-celebrity and the jockeying for position and the social rigmarole and all the rest because it was part of the game and Francesca did know how to play the game, that’s for sure, but she would have known the score, she would have rolled her eyes, and she would have laughed. Boy, would we have laughed.”
An associated exhibit, "Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel,” will be on view at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris this summer.