Back to life.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN

VICTORIA MIRO

LONDON, ENGLAND

JUNE 19-JULY 28, 2007

FRANCESCA WOODMAN

TATE MODERN

LONDON, ENGLAND

MAY 1, 2007-APRIL 13, 2008

Francesca Woodman's reputation precedes her. Precocious prodigy, feminist case study, tragic suicide--the critical constructions of the artist since her early death in 1981 are symptomatic of the repeated display of just a fraction of the eight hundred or so photographs she produced. Often faceless, masked, or blurred to the point of nearly total indistinction, Woodman's photographic iconography of an apparently precarious self has been interpreted as a project of almost obsessive self-representation.

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Two shows in London dispel the limits of this narrow focus, introducing unseen, experimental work by Woodman. Emphasizing for the first time her obvious fascination with her chosen medium, Woodman is represented as an artist engaged with pushing the limits, a "photographer's photographer" grappling with the conditions of photography itself.

Tate Modern offers a rare opportunity to view vintage prints made between 1975 and 1980, which were gifts to a boyfriend who appears alongside her in one double portrait. The handcrafted prints' lure is undeniable, their precious detail inviting the viewer into a seductive encounter. But the spurious nature of that encounter is revealed, as time and again Woodman evades photographic capture, manipulating light as the agent of her own erasure. In one untitled image from 1977 she remains obscured in a darkened corner as a shaft of falling light fails to reach her, as if too weak to expose her image. In another from the late 1970s she holds up a fragment of mirror as if rehearsing a familiar trope of feminine representation. But rather than revealing her face, the glass shard deflects light to tear deep black and searing white cuts across the surface, barring our gaze. Although recalling the contrasting tones of Man Ray's solarized technique (confirming Woodman's connection to Surrealism and the placement of her work in the Tate's galleries dedicated to its legacy), Woodman's prints are the result of careful staging rather than darkroom trickery, introducing a performative element to her photography that is sometimes overlooked.

Performance is central to the newly restored Selected Video Works (1975-78) playing in a marginal balcony space separated from the main gallery. Here, the moving image is manipulated to further explore the themes of her still photography: in one fragment we see the artist's silhouette behind a sheet of paper on which her name is written in a shaky hand. Picking delicate tears in its surface, Woodman gradually reveals glimpses of her body before finally stepping through the paper, at which point the camera pans to reveal her face masked by another photograph as if obscured by the conditions of a medium she cannot fully escape. In a second video, she strips for the camera before lying on a floor scattered with white powder. She stands, leaving only her trace as a darkened imprint on the floorboards--the cast shadow that is the focus of one of the frequently reproduced photographs in the gallery next door. Drawing attention to the indexical nature of photography, Woodman's act recalls Roland Barthes's description in Camera Lucida (1982) of photography's "fugitive" conditions--as if tracing with her body the necessary absence on which its representation depends.

Across town at Victoria Miro a similar urge to flee was in evidence, culminating in the aptly-named "Swan Song" series produced in 1978 as Woodman's thesis show at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Bundled up and forgotten, the original large-scale prints (measuring over 3 square feet) were rediscovered some years later. Stained and brittle, the prints' fragility required digital reproductions to bring back to life a series unseen for nearly thirty years.

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Although the almost sculptural format of its installation is lost, a sense of Woodman's original experimentation survives. Shot from above, a horizontal band of backdrop paper extends the boundaries of the single frame with a film-like continuity, while also suggesting the cell-like spaces of a microscope slide, as the bird's-eye view offered by the camera's displaced position places the artist underneath its scrutinizing lens. Like the deadened bird parts placed next to her body in one untitled shot from 1978, Woodman becomes a specimen--her body exposed to a disciplinary photographic gaze haunted by the pseudoscientific applications of its nineteenth-century origins.

But Woodman refuses to be contained. The upended view lends her slightly moving body an illusory weightlessness, as if suspended between the stilled and moving image. Wearing a bleached white, roughly torn paper wing, Woodman's ephemerality prefigures the later "On Being an Angel" series (1978) (examples of which are included with the more familiar works in the adjoining gallery), while the print's screen-size scale looks forward to the even larger projected "blueprints" she began just before her death. One can only speculate how far Woodman would have taken her experiments with the medium; but, for the first time, she is revealed as a young artist pushing at its limits.

HARRIET RICHES is Lecturer in Visual Culture & the History of Art at Middlesex University in London.

Francesca Woodman, edited by Chris Townsend. Phaidon/240pp./$75.00(hb).

Francesca Woodman's only monograph to date illuminates Woodman's work with over 250 beautifully reproduced images; insightful writings by the book's editor. Chris Townsend; and artful writings by Woodman herself. The photographic work is divided fittingly into categories of space and time, and includes a number of previously unpublished works. The selected images demonstrate how Woodman's photographs go beyond haunting self-portraiture--they explore her interests in form, the slippery nature of reality, and the loosening of photography's grip on veracity.

Like a secret meant to be shared. this volume houses excerpts from Woodman's many journals, along with recto versos of postcards sent to friends and relatives. Woodman's journal entries provide insight and context for her way of seeing and being in the world. The reader can also find sketches of some of the photographs in the book, such as the plan for "Spring in Providence" which includes a supply list: thumbtacks, ladder, tripod, and cabbage.

An enigma both through her work and her death, Woodman is presented more comprehensively here than anywhere before. But if you are looking for a definitive resolution with her early passing, this book will only disappoint. Rather than foolishly suggest answers, Townsend outlines the void left by Woodman's premature departure. Her accomplishments at such an early age leave the reader mourning the work that this artist might have created later in her life, while celebrating the work left behind.

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TAMMIE MALARICH