Francesca Woodman reconsidered: a conversation with George Baker, Ann Daly, Nancy Davenport, Laura Larson, and Margaret Sundell

The impetus for this round table came from the desire to extend an informal discussion following a screening of Elisabeth Subrin's The Fancy, an experimental film addressing the work and figure of the photographer Francesca Woodman. A student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late I970s, Woodman produced a strikingly mature body of work before committing suicide in 1981 at the age of twenty-two. Although during her lifetime she participated in a number of exhibitions in alternative spaces in New York and Rome, Woodman's first significant public exposure came posthumously, through a 1986 exhibition coorganized by the Wellesley College Museum and the Hunter College Art Gallery. An accompanying catalogue featured essays by Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. These texts, particularly the latter, which situated Woodman's work in relation to the postmodern feminist practice of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, played a determinate role in her initial art-historical reception. Indeed, it was through this lens that I first encountered her photographs in the early 1990s, and it was, in part, my sense of the limitations of Solomon-Godeau's analysis of Woodman's art as a strategic appropriation and subversion of stereotypes of femininity that motivated my own writing on Woodman.

Consisting mainly of self-consciously staged self-portraits or images of female friends acting as surrogates for the artist, Woodman's photographs exude a profound ambivalence-a simultaneous refusal and yearning to be constituted in the field of vision as an object of desire. The ideological orientation of Solomon-Godeau's text foreclosed the exploration of precisely this messier, less obviously "critical" but also potentially rich feature of Woodman's art. But while pointing to a model of subjectivity too complex to be adequately encompassed by 1980s feminism's politicized use of psychoanalytic theory, the ambivalent nature of Woodman's project also renders it susceptible to being read as a precedent for (and, by implication, a validation of) the pseudocritical examination of feminine identity taken up by a number of women photographers in the late 1990s. To reconsider Woodman's work in 2003 thus involves, on the one hand, a reassessment of its reception, both by art historians and artists, and, on the othe r hand, a reevaluation of the work itself. What, if any, is the critical potential of Woodman's art? To what extent and in what ways do her photographs resist their existing interpretative frameworks? If certain features of Woodman's work have been obscured or overlooked in prior readings, how might they be most productively illuminated and how might their elucidation alter our understanding of Woodman's art-historical significance? These are the questions that this discussion seeks to raise and begin to answer.

Margaret Sundell

George Baker: I just got back from a trip to Rome, where I came across this really amazing little store run by a bibliophile in the Jewish ghetto. He had reproductions of Francesca Woodman's work all over, and catalogues and posters related to Woodman, which were very clearly marked "not for sale," as if they were precious to him but were there to be shared and consulted. In the Roman context she's obviously still present and very much celebrated.

Margaret Sundell: She did spend a semester in Rome while she was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Baker: It's the place where she's been exhibited the most since her death in 1981. I'm wondering what kind of reception she's had outside of Italy and the United States. The recent retrospective of her work was organized in France. (1)

Larson: She has received a lot of critical attention, although not during her lifetime.

Sundell: Awareness of the work has been growing, especially in the past eight or nine years. A lot more people seem to know about her work than when I was first introduced to it. In fact, I thought we should have this conversation in the wake of our group viewing of another artist's work about Woodman--Elisabeth Subrin's film The Fancy. (2)

Baker: How did you find out about Woodman?

Sundell: Through a photographer named Moyra Davey. She thought I'd be interested in Woodman, so she showed me the catalogue from a 1986 show at Wellesley College, the one organized by Ann Gabhart. And, of course, I was very interested.

Ann Daly: Wasn't that Wellesley exhibition the first introduction of her work to a larger audience too?

Sundell: Yes, the show and particularly the catalogue, since it had essays by Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. But it still didn't get that much exposure. The catalogue wasn't widely distributed. I think the fact that Krauss and Solomon-Godeau reprinted their texts on Woodman in their anthologies, Bachelors and Photography at the Dock, really helped to raise Woodman's profile. (3) And Krauss put one of Woodman's photographs on the cover of Bachelors. The show at the Fondation Cartier, which was much more comprehensive than the Wellesley exhibition, was also important.