Francesca Woodman, Roland Barthes, and Fighting the Struggling Artist Trope

Exposed to the art world at a very young age through her parents, George and Betty Woodman, who were both working artists in painting and ceramics, Francesca Woodman produced the majority of her work while attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work primarily consisted of experimentation with the self-portrait, similar in nature to the work of Cindy Sherman or Nan Goldin, of whom Woodman was a foreshadowed inspiration. She was interested in how one can be a burden on space within the frames of a photograph and how that burden could be a source of power or, furthermore, an assertion. In her more iconic works, there's a running theme of the backgrounds being set in what appear to be abandoned and dilapidated spaces, forgotten if not for Woodman's physical input—drawing out the experience of wanting to be seen and heard as a female artist while recognizing the weariness of self that follows. In many of her portraits, her face is either partially or entirely obscured, with a greater emphasis on capturing movement and thinking about the body as decorative to the scene. Many critical assessments of her work often relate it to her untimely death, as a kind of confessional testament. At times, the romanticism of her life struggles comes to overshadow the technical and aesthetic quality of her photographs. Sometimes we search for turmoil all too eagerly, as there's such a mythos surrounding the tormented artist. I'm reminded of Frida Kahlo's self-portraits and how hopeless it seems to separate her life's trauma from her artistic expression.

There's a kind of ultimate sacrifice in being willing to create regardless of how it might affect your well-being. Yet how could this mythos potentially suppress the artist's intentions both during their lifetime and afterward? Following graduation from RISD, Woodman faced an immense struggle in being accepted in the art world, as her style of photography wasn't appealing to the mainstream interest of the time. She attempted suicide twice in the span of two years before succeeding in 1982, at only 22. Her death ensured her legacy. It's inexplicable how interconnected photography as a medium is to our understanding of life and death. More so than any other medium, there is a need to defy time in photographic practice. Roland Barthes discusses at length how a photograph has the potential to undertake a kind of sentience and, for lack of better words, "soul" when left to exceed the life of its creator. "Camera Lucida," Barthes' seminal written work on the photographic practice, is intrinsically interwoven with his mother's death. In particular, viewing photos of his mother wasn't an attempt to bring her back to life but to find solace in a proof of mortality. Barthes recognized that anyone who creates a photograph must be aware of the fact that it might ultimately be used as a commemorative effort to their life despite the original intentions of the work. That you can't escape the confines of relating your devotions to how you died. Barthes' memory is inevitably intertwined with the death of his mother and his own untimely passing three years later, being struck by a laundry van in Paris. Considering the creative act as a means of grieving brings a new connotation to the life of an artist as one who spends their whole life mourning. Especially as a photographer, you're never allowed to leave something unfinished like a painter can sit with a half-blank canvas.

Barthes briefly discusses the "noise of time" concerning not only that of clocks and stopwatches but also early cameras, with emphasis on their physical nature. You can feel the shutter click on a film camera in a way that you don't pay much attention to on digital. The movement that Woodman captured in many of her self-portraits seems to hint at the concept of the "noise of time." In experimenting with how one might be able to document passing time, we only see glimpses of her body as a shadow of presence, creating a photograph that, in its present state, is already far into the past. While also resisting the borders of a photograph, she refuses to be dismissed.

I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see, and show them something different – Francesca Woodman