“NOn is of his photograph that I want to speak, not really. It’s strange, it’s she who wants to see. Being there next to her for a few seconds to see her in action, perhaps this is only what I am looking for. It is she who would like to find and bring back to life as if by magic, thanks to writing “. Bertrand Shefer
Begins more or less like that Bertrand Shefer’s booktraining philosopherFrench novelist and essayist that Francesca Woodman dedicates one of the most beautiful biographies that they have never been written in the photographic field. With the translation of Andrea Franzoni, the publisher published it Johan & Levi in 2024.
A biography to read
It should be read. Because Woodman is legendin photography perhaps the only saint we venerate. Suicidal martyr, loved and late, sacred and immortal, He is the artist to whom everyone, but above all all, refer to when we think about intimate photography. Over the past few decades, many photographers have tried to replicate its imagination of empty rooms, corners and walls, light and wind, shadows and ghosts and its icastic body capable of expressing a wide range of emotions, fears, fragility.
Full of her aura, her work, she herself, are rather unknown to the general public. Excelsa poet, alternates curse and melancholy with a photographic metric full of grace.
The anniversary
A few days ago the anniversary of his death, which took place in New York, on January 19, 1981, occurred. Suicida as a Rockstar, he threw himself from the window of his apartment at 22 years old. Beautiful and painfully damned, she consumed an intense and silent life. As his images are, a precious treasure.
The origins
Born in Denver, Colorado, on April 3, 1958, children of artists, his painter father and his mother ceramist, with his family spent long periods in Italy, in Antella, a small medieval village on the outskirts of Florence. Just in the Tuscan capital Woodman attends the second grade and takes piano lessons. The link with Italy is strong, so much so that he returns to Rome to study art. It is the 70s, there is the transavaggardia and the capital is a crossroads of international artists. Woodman absorbs the spirit of time, lives and contaminates genres and languages. He knows art and photography, among the relevant influences there is that of Julia Margaret Cameron, a forerunner of dreamlike photography, so much so that last year the National Portrait Gallery in London dedicated to both an exhibition for a suggestive exchange of visions Between the ‘800 and’ 900.
Restless
A restless soul between the forests of New Hampshire and the Tuscan countryside, between the streets of Rome and those of New York, between Gothic settings and vintage clothes, Francesca does not seek the representation of itself in dialogue with external reality. He wants his space to stage himself giving free rein to his restless and complex self. It is sought and digs, shapes the nightmares, assails fears, evokes death, its body is the medium, the mirror offers the reflection that investigates the soul and its double. Inside and outside, as the biographer writes.
“You always inside and never outside, walled inside without ever a sky anywhere, who photograph yourself without stopping but you can never reach you“. Bertrand Shefer
Looking for welcome at galleries that will refuse it, it will be consecrated to success only as a dead.
“I wonder if it is appropriate to tell her this story of an eccentric, anonymous girl, who left behind a amazing work, of which she never knew the impact she would have. ” Bertrand Shefer
“Francesca Woodman” by Bertrand Schefer, Johan & Levi68 pages, 14 €
The illusion of reality
The image is an illusion of reality, she knows.
Everything is true and nothing is. Everything is changed and the truth is only a fleeting moment.
In the empty rooms, austere and romantic microcosm of Francesca, moves the ghost body of the artist, adorned with thin or essential poignant clothes of naked nudity; Polymorphic shadows are chasing, ephemeral bodies of moods that photography cannot hold back.
The photographs have a special relationship with time, because they only describe the present, supported John Szarkowski, a mythical director of the MoMA photography.
And here, in the infinite present, Woodman puts in place his suspended world where identity and emotions, secrets and fears merge into the photographic act. Crossing with surprising ease or crazy unreasonableness, that line that connects reality and imagination. Audace surrealist, Woodman does not fear judgment, creation is a vortex, an incandescent exploration, a descent into darkness, a journey into the dream. There is the spell of the eternal moment. And the shape, always decomposed, irregular, now in a corner, now too low. The form never defined. Animated by a thrill. A ghost figure, a vision, creature of the mind. The body becomes language, folds, torches, stands, an instrument that draws on the poor walls of the rooms. A mutant body to which they belong to childhood, adolescence and youth, the indefinite time in which nothing is accomplished, as in the end nothing is ever done of ourselves.
The essential
In Woodman’s work there is the essential that is never easy, since it is the sum of countless layers of experiences and memories.
Francesca’s world is ground, yet she always seems to be about to hover. Observing his feet, to understand if they adhere to the surface, you often have the impression that it is about to fly, perhaps to escape, or perhaps it would simply like to float. In all his work, there is the fury of youth, the urgency of freeing himself from demons, the contempt for formalism, the freedom of research, the courage to express himself.
Francesca Woodman has never known glory. He could not have imagined how charming his work would have aroused. More than 40 years after his death, we are here to talk about it, to read the biography of Shefer that searches her, finds it, translates it, hypothesizes it to return the seduction of the enigma that contains the poignant and coherent work of a girl American who loved Italy, too damned for this cursed unfair world.
“History is not in the image, but in our relationship with the image, in what it deposits in us”. Bertrand Shefer
The precious books of the English publisher Mack
At the work of Woodman, the English publisher Mack dedicates the bookThe artist’s bookspublished in 2023 of which you can see an extract in the gallery. And always Mack, He dedicates a luxurious box that includes the facsimiles of the eight extraordinary artist books by Francesca Woodman, containing the reproductions of his original prints to the silver jelly and transparencies as objects, each of which has been inserted by hand. Each book is unique in its production and shape, and reflects the variety of materials of the original works of Woodman. These eight volumes are collected in a shell case, bound in a japanese mulberry material. In addition to the well -known artist’s books by Woodman, in particular some disordered interior geometries, this box also presents two recently discovered books, never seen or exhibited before.
The books that Woodman has reused for his process were purchased in local shops and flea markets during his travels in Italy and provide intriguing backgrounds on which he glued his prints and transparencies. Having collected together, these objects demonstrate a sophisticated relationship with the narrative and sequence and offer a new understanding of the Woodman’s commitment of the commitment with the book form.
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