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Even the title is an art-historical in-joke – a reference to a famous self-portrait made by the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer at the same age. One remarkable early work, Self-Portrait at 13, shows her in baggy fisherman's sweater and trousers, face swallowed by a mane of thick hair, caught in a halo of light (she appears to be operating the shutter-release with a stick or cable pulled taut, which becomes a ghostly presence in the frame). Encouraged by a teacher, she started taking pictures almost immediately and appears to have emerged, astonishingly, almost fully formed. "We kind of assumed that was normal – of course we'd been to the Sistine Chapel, of course we've been to the Prado, to the Louvre." (Charles, too, ended up as an artist, this time in video and electronics.)įrancesca's way in was the medium-format Yashica camera her father gave her when she went to boarding school in 1972. Though money wasn't plentiful, Charles recalls family holidays in Europe during which the kids spent most of their time being dragged through museums and galleries, imbibing art.
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Their mother, Betty, made ceramics their father, George, was a painter and taught at the university.
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"It was like a background, just there," he tells BBC Culture over the phone, from his home in California. Woodman was born in Denver, Colorado to a family in which, according to her older brother Charles, art was a kind of religion. "It feels important to give Francesca her own voice," says Lissa McClure, head of the Woodman Family Foundation, which guards the photographer's legacy and is behind the new show. Revealing excerpts from her copious notes and writings are printed in the accompanying catalogue. Panic? Terror? Despair? Again, her face is blurred, unreadable whatever is going on here, we are left to guess.Ī new exhibition at the Marian Goodman gallery in New York invites us to look again at Woodman, perhaps more carefully and attentively. Pointedly entitled Alternate Stories, it contains about 50 photographs and contact sheets, nearly half of which have never been seen publicly before.
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Yet the most disturbing thing on view is the figure clad in a white leotard far-right, crouching on the floor with her arms bunched around her neck. This one is of an old anatomical museum with glass cases on the wall displaying waxwork foetuses. The photography pioneers who were erasedĪnother picture is even stranger. A glitch with the film? A ghost transforming itself from ectoplasm into human form? Whoever this person is, they appear to be dangling from above the frame, or possibly leaping down into it. Then you notice the apparition – a blurred shape approximately identifiable as human. The paint is peeling, the floorboards dusty. A large pane of glass leans against the wall a dark doorway is behind. We're in a domestic interior of some kind. At first glance, the photograph looks straightforward enough.