Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman was an American photographer who was born in Denver, Colorado. Her mother was Jewish and her father from a Protestant background. She took her first self-portrait at age thirteen and continued with photographed until her death. She went to a public school and then a private school from 1972 where she developed her photographic skills and became fully interested in the art form. She moved to New York City in 1979 ” to make a career in photography”. She sent out many portfolios of her work to fashion photographers but they did not lead her anywhere. Due to her failure, she became depressed and attempted suicide in 1980.

During the time of 1972- 1980 was when she made most of her photos most of which were black and white images including either naked women or clothes merging with their surroundings. She took all her images with medium format. She created over 10,000 failure images which her parents keep, otherwise the 120 images which have been produced are found by location and date.

After producing all these images and most of them being a failure, she ended up dying from another suicide attempt age twenty two by jumping out of a loft window in New York City. After her suicide, her father suggested that her suicide was related to an unsuccessful application for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In a exhibition in 1998, many people were very interested in her work and they had “strong reactions” to her ” interesting” photographs. Many people found her pictures inspirational.

Her work 

When looking into her work i noticed that a lot of her work was very blurred to hide the identity of people in the pictures. Otherwise, the models were placed in very peculiar positions, acting as if they weren’t in their normal bodies, almost acting as an escape. The fact that most of the models weren’t clothed also suggests that Woodman was trying to show the real them and not who they pretend to be behind their clothes and makeup.

Her creations…

Analysation image..

Technical analysis 

In this image we can tell the image has been taken with a wide depth of field as the image is fully focused in a natural light. We can tell that this is in a natural light due to the one source of light on the right hand side of the image from a high angle. Due to the natural lighting, i assume that the white balance was set to a daylight mode or shade mode. We can also tell the this picture has been taken with a quick shutter speed to allow the image to be fully focused.

Visual analysis 

This black and white edited image can be seen as helping to bring out different tones in the picture. The edit also provides more of a dark concept. We can see by the floor tiles that the image has a great deal of texture due to the dirty floor. We can also see that this image is in 2D, that there is no pattern in the image and can overall tell that it is very unique.

Conceptual analysis

When looking at this image i have drawn to the crouched lady at the back left of the image. Her choice of wearing all black adds a dark feel to the already darkly lit image. In the image she is covering her face with a white circle, this could have multiple meanings but to me it suggests that she doesn’t know her identity, who she is. The white circle is acting like a blank canvas and she is suggesting that someone comes and draws the ideal look on her face. This image has shown to be heavily related to ‘loss of identity’.

Contextual analysis 

Woodman didn’t release any of the images which are online today and therefore all the audience know is the location the picture was taken and the date it was taken. There is no back story to this image.