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拍品专文
Surrealistically uncanny, confrontational and supernatural, this quintet of photographs by Francesca Woodman captures the essence of the American artist’s maturing style and thematic substance. Executed during her tenure as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence and Rome (1975-78), this ensemble of pictures centres around Woodman’s life-long engagement with her own body as a vehicle for expression, and the camera lens as an instrument for the temporal suspension of space and light. Whilst each photograph in this group transfixes the viewer with the same sense of monochrome, vintage ethereality that permeates Woodman’s entire oeuvre, the works on offer here are versatile remnants of her enthralling, unique vision.
With their full-frontal poses, the breasts emphasised by cupped hands or unbuttoned dresses, the figures in photographs (iv) and (iii) – Woodman and a companion, possibly close college friend Besty Berne – evidently challenge the unremitting force of the male gaze. Meanwhile, there is a spectral magic to photograph (v) (another edition is housed in the Tate’s collection), in which Woodman sits on a chair in a seemingly derelict building, nude except for a pair of Mary Jane-style shoes. At her feet, the wooden floorboards are charred with an apparitional imprint of her figure, the shadowgraph created by the artist coating herself in a mound of photosensitive powder. This uncanny transformation of the body is also present in photograph (ii), the ghostly sfumato of Woodman’s form made stranger by the detritus scattered across the lower half of her body. Even the pane of glass precariously wedged between Woodman’s legs in photograph (i) turns a transparent window into a mystifying veil.
For all their diverse approaches to narrative, it seems that these five photographs share one underlying bond – an exploration of the relationship between appearance and concealment. Whether Woodman’s body is cropped (i, iv), erupts from clothes (iii), is mutated and manipulated (ii, v) or is paradoxically exposed in its occultation (i), her self-portrayal probes deep into the presence of the human form and its involvement with spatial surroundings. Woodman alters the atmospheric timbre, as well as the tone of her own form, by taking photographs with a long exposure, so that light drenches her compositions, the effect intensifying the spectral engagement of sitter and setting. With these interventions, professor and writer Chris Townsend claims, Woodman has emphasised ‘a failure of space’: ‘to undermine the photograph as a guarantor of presence she must become an apparition… Far from being a body trapped by time and space, hers is a body that, through its use as a disordering principle, calls time and space into question… She offers the possibility of a space in the photograph other than the flat plane of representation, the banal plane of analogical fact’ (C. Townsend, Francesca Woodman, London, 2006, p. 27). Executed shortly before Woodman’s tragic suicide, an event that has superfluously clouded her career with a suffocating, macabre, gothic romanticism, these works antithetically revel in an enigmatic, witty and confident emancipation of form, temporality and ambiance.
With their full-frontal poses, the breasts emphasised by cupped hands or unbuttoned dresses, the figures in photographs (iv) and (iii) – Woodman and a companion, possibly close college friend Besty Berne – evidently challenge the unremitting force of the male gaze. Meanwhile, there is a spectral magic to photograph (v) (another edition is housed in the Tate’s collection), in which Woodman sits on a chair in a seemingly derelict building, nude except for a pair of Mary Jane-style shoes. At her feet, the wooden floorboards are charred with an apparitional imprint of her figure, the shadowgraph created by the artist coating herself in a mound of photosensitive powder. This uncanny transformation of the body is also present in photograph (ii), the ghostly sfumato of Woodman’s form made stranger by the detritus scattered across the lower half of her body. Even the pane of glass precariously wedged between Woodman’s legs in photograph (i) turns a transparent window into a mystifying veil.
For all their diverse approaches to narrative, it seems that these five photographs share one underlying bond – an exploration of the relationship between appearance and concealment. Whether Woodman’s body is cropped (i, iv), erupts from clothes (iii), is mutated and manipulated (ii, v) or is paradoxically exposed in its occultation (i), her self-portrayal probes deep into the presence of the human form and its involvement with spatial surroundings. Woodman alters the atmospheric timbre, as well as the tone of her own form, by taking photographs with a long exposure, so that light drenches her compositions, the effect intensifying the spectral engagement of sitter and setting. With these interventions, professor and writer Chris Townsend claims, Woodman has emphasised ‘a failure of space’: ‘to undermine the photograph as a guarantor of presence she must become an apparition… Far from being a body trapped by time and space, hers is a body that, through its use as a disordering principle, calls time and space into question… She offers the possibility of a space in the photograph other than the flat plane of representation, the banal plane of analogical fact’ (C. Townsend, Francesca Woodman, London, 2006, p. 27). Executed shortly before Woodman’s tragic suicide, an event that has superfluously clouded her career with a suffocating, macabre, gothic romanticism, these works antithetically revel in an enigmatic, witty and confident emancipation of form, temporality and ambiance.