http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francesca-woodman-10512

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman was born April 1958 and died in 1981. On 9th January Woodman died by suicide after jumping out of a loft window of a building on the East Side of New York. One of her friends wrote  “things had been bad, there had been therapy, things had gotten better, guard had been let down.” She died at the age of 22. She was an American photographer who was best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself or other female models.  Many of her images contain the subject naked or clothed, blurred or merging with their surroundings.

During Woodman’s life she used many different types of media for her work. For her photography Woodman used different cameras and film formats. She used medium format cameras producing 6x6cm square negatives. Over her life Woodman created at least 10,000 negatives. Most of Woodman’s work is untitled and only known by the location at which they were taken.

Woodman’s images contain this haunting atmosphere because of the environment, the bleakness and the poses that the subject is doing. I love how her images look.  Woodman was struggling with life which I can clearly feel from dissecting her images. The black and white really emphasizes the haunting and death like atmosphere that Woodman is trying to create.

Her images are relatively similar to Rebecca Horn’s because they both use themselves as the main subject. They also have this bleak, eary atmosphere  which coincides with their experiences of life. In the late 1980’s Woodman became depressed because of the failure of her work gaining attention. It was also due to a broken down relationship. Woodman survived a suicide attempt in the autumn of 1980.

I choose Woodman as my second Historical Photographer because her photography is so unique from her time period. She only becomes famous after her death, which shows us how she found it hard for people to share her artistic style and perspective.