Francesca Woodman Update June 2022

 Someone asked me the other day (not the first person) would I do a detailed sketch and summary of all the materials I have been reading and studying on Francesca Woodman. It's a nice thought, but it's a lot of work to recap my reading notes and then type them up into a prepared form for a blog. If anyone truly looks at my blog, they would realize that it's just really scattered notes, mainly written for my grandchildren, a kind of digital scrapbooks of marginalia, ideas, paintings, quotes, an assemblage is what I would call it and have called it. 

I've finished four additional books on Woodman since fall 2021, and I really haven't thought on how to organize my notes on the books or individual photos, but I will do that and see if I can come up with a plan. I don't think there is any one individual site dedicated to the photographer but the Woodman Trust on Instagram, and while that's the source to go to, it lacks contemplation. Simply put, there is not much discussion on the photos.

I think it should be quite obvious to people at this point that Francesca Woodman was a genius, that even in her youth, she had developed some mature skills and perspectives on her own work. That despite her pathology at the end of her short life, she had the needed objectiveness that goes with good art.

She is a fascinating figure to me for several reasons. One, she was working in the early 1970s, a time when my friends and I were also working in photography, though we were all younger than she. She also used low light, and very little materials to compose her images. But she was clever and very instinctive in just trying something new to see how it worked out. But what artist does not do the latter? We all do and we have far more failures than we have successes.

I've been working very hard this year myself, catching up from really two years of muddling my way through Covid anxieties and even 20 weeks last year of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. When one is creating, it's hard to blog and reflect, one is busy doing the work.  Even my journaling is anemic. But I have agreed to do some kind of written reflection on Woodman.