Dr Kostas Prapoglou in conversation with Lissa McClure on the work of FRANCESCA WOODMAN

by Dr. Kostas Prapoglou

This season, New Yorkers will have the great opportunity to view a series of rare and vintage photographs –many of which have never been seen before– by American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). During her short life, Woodman produced a substantial body of work while being a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (1975-8) as well as the following years. She lived in Rome as part of the RISD European Honors Programme, moved to New York in 1979, and became a fellow at MacDowell Colony in 1980. Woodman presented solo exhibitions at Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, USA, 1976; Woods-Gerry Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, USA, 1978, and Liberia Maldoror, Rome, 1978. Her work was included in group exhibitions at Galleria Ugo Ferranti, Rome, 1978 and the Alternative Museum, New York City, 1980, among others. A series of posthumous exhibitions were organised such as that of Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris in 1998, which travelled to Rotterdam, Lisbon, London, Barcelona, Milan, Dublin, and Madrid. A major retrospective was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art, California in 2011 and travelled to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2012. In 2015, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, organised and debuted On Being an Angel; which then travelled to Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, later that year; Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, Paris, France, 2016; Moderna Museet, Malmo, Sweden, 2017; Finnish Museum of Photography, 2017; Fundacion Canal, Madrid, Spain, 2019; and C/O Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2020. Her enigmatic and eerie images set in curious environments evoke the spaceless quality of presence and the human condition, exposed and presented in surreal situations.

I invited Lissa McClure, the Executive Director of The Woodman Family Foundation to discuss with me aspects of Francesca Woodman’s visual vocabulary and how the new presentation titled Alternate Stories at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York will embrace the essence of her practice and the spirit of her artistic utterance.

Kostas Prapoglou: What were Francesca Woodman’s influences and main source of inspiration and why do you think her work is still topical and relevant?

Lissa McClure: Francesca Woodman was born into a family of artists for whom art and artmaking were primary and foundational. They started spending significant time in Italy when she was a baby, and she grew up essentially bi-cultural—she even attended second grade in Florence. The family explored the country looking at art and architecture and Woodman often cited classical art as an influence. She wrote about the nude in her work in relationship to the classical nude and liked the idea of applying photography’s ‘rough edge’ to such idealised forms.
She also read a great deal, from Victorian literature to Surrealist novels. She cited the writing of Colette, Zola, and Breton as major influences, the latter for his ability to turn banal, everyday photographs into the plot of a story. She aspired to do the same. In her notes for an interview for an Italian magazine in 1979 she wrote “Words influence me a lot more than politics but I especially like allusive, indirect literary phrases and metaphors…I would like words to be to my photographs what the photographs are to the text in Andre Breton’s “Nadja.” He picks out all the allusions and enigmatic details of some rather ordinary unmysterious snapshots and elaborates them into a story. I’d like my photographs to condense experience.”
Woodman’s photographs capture the female body—often her own—in stillness or motion, in everyday places, in decaying architecture, doing fantastical or very ordinary things. She created a version of herself as a construct to animate these photographs, which means she both empowered herself and made herself vulnerable in her work. That’s a very human position, and I think probably something a lot of viewers relate to. Her work has likely withstood the test of time because there are many lenses through which to approach it. The images are elusive and mysterious, which make them even more compelling. She was determined to create a sense of timelessness in her work, which could help account for its enduring relevance. Woodman was also extremely skilled and purposeful technically and formally, which sometimes gets overshadowed by her content. She knew how to make a powerful photograph.

KP: Woodman’s practice and visual language have become widely recognisable and popular despite her short life and career. How do you explain this?

LMcC: Woodman made her first mature photograph at thirteen and was a fully formed artist by the time she arrived at art school. She used student compositional assignments at RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence) to expand her own conceptual and formal investigations. Her artistic voice was unique, she was ahead of her time, and the sheer force of her images has had a real staying power. In essence, she was able to cover a lot of ground in a short time. She was also, by all accounts, a singular and unconventional person, with a worldview to match, and this enlivened her work in a particular way. She created tonal and textural qualities in her gelatin silver prints that makes them unquestionably gorgeous. She chose to work small and mostly in black and white, often using herself as model, which is distinctive. There is an undeniable intimacy to her work. In the midst of all this, her gaze is captivating and unwavering, her surroundings somehow mysterious despite their ordinariness, and it’s hard not to want to enter the worlds she created.

KP: The exhibition features different thematological chapters. What are they and based on what elements have they been categorised?

LMcC: We approached this exhibition with a desire to show Woodman’s work in a fresh light, based on our own experience of looking at the complete body of work now in the care of the Woodman Family Foundation. I was bowled over by what I saw. There were many photographs that had never been shown before, often related to more well-known photographs in serial or contextual ways. We wanted to show some of this breadth. And certain loose themes – the body, Surrealism, Italian art history – presented themselves. We were also keen to give Woodman voice in this exhibition, literally and figuratively. Because we own her archive—personal papers, correspondence, ephemera, contact sheets—we were able to cite her own descriptions of her work, her influences, her conceptual structures, her formal concerns. Chris Kraus coined an incredibly apt term in her essay, Impure Alchemy, for the exhibition catalogue: “eroticized formalism.” I’d say the relationships between photographs, the groups that emerged, are as important as the thematic connections. We wanted to create a rhythm that allowed for looking at Woodman’s work in new ways.

KP: The majority of the works on view position the human body within various architectural environments. How this site-specificity dictate the aesthetics of her photographs as well as their unique ambience?

LMcC: It’s interesting, kind of a chicken and egg situation. We’ve got journals and notebooks where Woodman worked out ideas and made sketches that became identifiable photographs. Some start with the figure, in a classical position or in motion. Others clearly place those figures within specific architectural settings. Space itself is so often another protagonist in the work. Architecture and space can confine the body, or envelop it, or support it. Sometimes they set a stage for an action or formal study. Sometimes the architecture serves as a mirror, reinforces a mood, reveals a passageway. I think certain architectural spaces allowed Woodman to create that sense of timelessness she was after. After she’d moved to New York in 1979, she used tile patterns and structural components from friends’ bathrooms to replicate classical architecture. She began to work with architectural blueprint paper, making large scale diazotypes. Woodman was drawn to old things, decaying spaces. Her studios in Providence, Rome, and New York all share those qualities—and were probably all that were available on her budget! In her skilled hands, those spaces were transformed into enigmatic sites for her allegories.

KP: Are there any plans involving future surveys on Woodman’s work?

LMcC: A major solo show that originated at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and traveled throughout Europe for five years has recently ended. Now that the remainder of Woodman’s works have transferred to the Foundation, we’ve begun to have conversations with institutions about what comes next. We’re excited by the many ideas for future projects that have come from this new access to the work. Our hope is that curators will mount shows from different perspectives, as this exhibition does. Unlocking the archival material has introduced more avenues to explore curatorially. The interest and requests we’ve received lately from a young generation of scholars has been satisfying, proof that art historians and writers continue to gravitate to Woodman’s work.