Vanishing Point

"I would like words to have the same relationship with my images as the photographs have with the text in Nadja by André Breton" Francesca Woodman once stated before her early death at 22 in 1981.* 

In some connection that the poet would have appreciated, his 1928 version begins with him asking the old question “Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.” And in fact the images he uses to punctuate the text are so many phantomatic presences telling us who he is or was, or perhaps who Nadja is or was. The phrase he says “makes me play, while alive, the role of a ghost, obviously it alludes to the obligation that I must cease to be in order to be who I am."

And indeed phantoms haunt her oeuvre like a house over a cursed graveyard, its four walls witness to early and tragic deaths.  She tells us, 

“I am interested in the way people relate to space,” she wrote in her

journal. “The best way to do this is to depict their interactions to the

boundaries of these spaces. Started doing this with ghost pictures,

people fading into a flat plane — becoming the wall under wallpaper

or of an extension of the wall onto floor” . 

(cited in Katharine Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2013, p. 152)


In her oeuvre the opaque battles it out with the translucent (or is it something altogether, not a battle, but a struggle of love?) and her signature blur is a suggestion of movement, is sign of the quick soon to be still, when the shutter closes in on the moment in time.

Woodman is medium, in more than one sense, for the unquiet dead who do not respect temporality as the mortal coil experiences it. Rather they collapse it, after having snaked around it. Linear time could be a stand in for the “hard architectural outline” she describes when speaking of her work so : “Me and Francis Bacon and all those Baroques are all concerned with making something soft wiggle and snake around a hard architectural outline”  (cited in Katharine Conley, p. 151)

This seems in fact to be the case in  a work superimposing her poetry by its absent words (phantomatic and unsaid, once more) as transcribed by Alison Dunhill: 

"L’area d’un paralellogrammo e uguale al prodotto della base per l’altezza (from page six of original pamphlet, text above Woodman’s annotation ‘These things arrived from my grandmother’s they …Il quadrate considerate quai rombo he per superficie il semiprodotto d’una diagonal per se stessa …make me think about where I fit in the odd geometry of time." (Alison Dunhill, "Dialogues with Diagrams: Francesca Woodman’s book, some disordered interior Geometries,"p. 6)

The mention of her grandmother affirms that ghosts are a genealogy that inflects to the feminine. Curiously, Hugo Boxel , young provincial lawyer, in a letter to Spinoza shares that “there are spirits of all kinds, except perhaps of the feminine sex”  (Gunther Coppens, « Spinoza et Boxel. Une histoire de fantômes », Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 41, 2004, p. 59-72. )  It’s an odd observation, for --from the Fox sisters to folklore’s famous phantoms-- the realm of ghosts, be it the creatures who haunt or those who conjure them to communication, is a resolutely female sphere. Unseen, or barely there –the uncanny and the ectoplasmic – a long line of female ghosts manifesting that all is not well– Grey Ladies and White, La Llorona, the adolescent poltergeist, Bloody Mary in the mirror and the vanishing hitchhiker...

While the machine of the camera, as well as the scopic act, may be the realm of the masculine, Woodman has taken possession of both. This, though, is no clear-eyed shutterbug with lids wide open onto the world as it is to better capture it like so many butterflies pinned to a velvet covered board – or is it? Clear-eyed inspite of her hazy-edged spirits, in one of her last notes before her first suicide attempt she said

“I finally managed,” she explains, “to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible…. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.” cited in “The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman,” cited in Elizabeth Gumport, NYRB Jan 24, 2011












*"Vorrei che le parole avessero con le mie immagini lo stesso rapporto che le fotografie hanno con il testo in Nadja di André Breton" altorta, Roberta. Francesca Woodman. Progresso Fotografico, 1979 October;86:10:46-50, translation Alison Dunhill) “Dialogues with Diagrams: Francesca Woodman’s book, some disordered interior Geometries” Alison Dunhill, re·bus, Issue 2 ,(Autumn 2008)





































Opening photo : Francesca Woodman: House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976