Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman's photography had a strong impact on me when I first started taking photography seriously; her work along with others (Man Ray, Duane Michel’s, Ralph Meatyard, Moholy-nagy, Jerry Uelsmann, and Dali) definitely inspired me to experiment with movement, blurring, and manipulation within the medium. Woodman blurs fantasy with reality in a way which has always inspired me to find the unusual in everyday life. I want to create scenes for the audience to be a part of; something which the viewer knows must exist but has the same unusual eerie feel of standing in a dark room looking at an installation piece.
Woodman constructs her scenes by superimposing various levels of the real rather than breaking down reality to study the image's constructive mechanisms. In a similar way, at the end of the 70s Cindy Sherman appeared on the scene with a series of photographic "Film Stills" that manifest the influences of the film culture and a linear approach to the image. Each picture was a "slice of life," walking the line between fiction and reality. Each picture provided the viewer with a precise image of a woman acting out our clichés concerning traditional female roles. But in spite of the common ground shared by these two photographers, Woodman never seemed interested in the cultural model of today's woman: there is no objective investigation in her work, only a personal kind of research. Basically, while Cindy Sherman offered — in image after image — a fragmentary vision of women, Francesca Woodman gave us a cumulative one, images that take on the woman's different models. Woodman was photographer and model, subject and object, at the same time. She utilized the female body to develop her own self-knowledge and not some representative but generic model of the world. The images of the body that this young American was experimenting with suggest a diffuse intimacy while tending to dissuade a voyeuristic approach. Unlike most of the images we are faced with on a daily basis, where the body is treated like a commodity to be used and consumed, or an icon to adore at safe distance, Francesca Woodman employs her body to initiate a dialog with herself. She places her body in familiar settings, though at the limits of our experience, presenting it as a symbol of receptivity, a meeting place between herself and the rest of the world, a communicative model in which information about her experience is presented and reflected upon. She uses her own body as a model to investigate her own vision and not another's vision of her body. Woodman projects images and symbols, hopes and fears onto the female body. She uses it like a gesticulative vector not fully known to her, communicating to the viewer the novelty of her encounter.