‘I feel like I am floating in plasma. I need a teacher or a lover. I need someone to risk being involved with me. I am so vain and so masochistic.’

– Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman was born in Denver in 1958 to two American Artists, she also had a close relationship with her brother Charles Woodman who himself was aspiring to be a video artist. Whilst they grew up their home was described as ‘the creative and social hub of the art community of the town’ as art was just ‘the way of life’ for the Woodman family.

When Woodman was 13 she attended a private boarding school where she began to find her interest in photography having taken her dads camera with her. She had a photography class where she learnt the basic skills and starting to have some faith in her own projects. Woodman relied on her teacher for reassurance in her own ability.

During Summers spent in Italy, Woodman became interested with La Specola, the Museum of Natural History in Florence, making friends with the guards so that she could be allowed in to take pictures when the museum was closed to the public. After she graduated in 1978, she went to live in Rome for a whole year, as part of the School of Design’s Rome Honours program. Francesca Woodman is known for not liking the term ‘self portrait’ and was known for being very serious and very playful at the same time, despite this being very conflicting.

Woodman explored and tested what she could do with photography. She explored the idea that the camera fixes time and space – something that had always been seen as one of the fundamentals of photography. She did this by manipulating light and movements, and used props, vintage clothing and ‘gloomy’ interiors to add a mysterious atmosphere to the her final pieces.

When Francesca Woodman was 22 she published her first art publication, but completed suicide shortly after. She did this by jumping from a loft building in New York. When she died, critic Ken Johnson said ‘hardly anyone beyond her family, friends, classmates, and teachers knew about the phenomenal body of work she had produced.’ Her mum, Betty, said ‘things were not rosy and wonderful for Francesca’ in an attempt to highlight her long standing depression as the ultimate cause of her death.