Francesca Woodman
Made small, blurred self-portraits in empty rooms, almost all of them before she was twenty-two.
Francesca Woodman was born in Denver in 1958 to the painter George Woodman and the ceramicist Betty Woodman, made her first self-portrait at thirteen, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, spending a year in Rome on its honours programme. The work is almost entirely black-and-white photographs of herself or friends in derelict rooms in Providence and Rome — half hidden behind wallpaper or a fireplace, blurred by long exposures, merging with the space — small in scale and deeply literate about Surrealism and nineteenth-century photography. She moved to New York in 1979, produced the artist's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries, and made large blueprint works shortly before her death by suicide in 1981, at twenty-two. Almost all of her reputation was made afterwards.
Lifetime and posthumous prints are the essential distinction. The prints Woodman made herself are small gelatin silver prints, few in number and often variable in tone. After her death her parents' estate, now the Woodman Family Foundation, authorised posthumous prints from her negatives, generally larger and made in numbered editions with the estate's stamp. The two are entirely different objects, and a posthumous print of a well-known image is not a vintage one. Paper, size, stamps and inscriptions on the verso are how they are told apart. The large diazotypes are scarce and fragile, and fading is their principal risk. The Woodman Family Foundation holds the archive and is the reference.
If you own a work by Francesca Woodman
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