FRANCESCA WOODMAN

Francesca Woodman (April 3, 1958 - January 19, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young nude women, blurred by camera movement and long exposure times, merging with their surroundings, or with their faces obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much attention, years after she committed suicide at the age of 22. - wikipedia

''Even as the range of her photographic techniques increased, the emotional range of her images contracted in ever tightening circles. A sense of loss and longing inhabited her earliest work, but by the end, it came to define it.'' - Fred Turner

With my work from last year I looked deep into Francesca Woodman's work, into her ideas, her unusual setting and posing and her use of self-portraits. This time I am simply looking at her work to experience a feeling. Her work makes me feel uneasy and intrigued, there is no knowing what ideas she had behind her photographs because she was never spoken to about her art as most of it was discovered when she committed suicide. I'm interested in her use of subjects, she uses them as a canvas, she simply chooses her subject and puts them into a situation in a location and lets it flow naturally. That is what is so interesting, as Fred Turner says above, there is a sense of loss and longing which defines her work. You can feel it even if you didn't know she was so troubled. Her use of documenting her ideas through the camera is done in such an inspirational way, looking through her work is almost like looking through a diary. Her work is said to be heavily influenced by the photographers of that time - Duane Michals and Cindy Sherman, its said negatively but it seems to me to be a positive statement, we are all influenced and inspired by others working in the same way. I am looking at her body of work to figure out some sort of style and process I want to proceed with, her rough unclean surroundings in the photographs are maybe not what I want in mine. This is the look I normally go for but this time i want it to be about the process and the emotion I get from the subject not the way they work with the interesting surroundings.