Francesca Woodman was best known for her black and white photography. Her artistic career, while short, was broad with her studies ranging from in America where she was born, to Rome. She used many different cameras in her short career that spanned a mere twelve years, but in that time she created at least ten thousand negatives.
A great number of her photographs are untitled and can only be identified by date or place. There is a lot of mystery in her black and white photographs. The suggestive nature of many of her photographs create thought provoking questions. Did she like the lighting or did she mean it as a comment towards woman's bodies or sexual behaviour? Being untitled makes it hard figuring out what the artist was exactly trying to portray in the images.
Motion blur is a big part of many of her images, the figure becomes almost unrecognisable, sometimes blurring into the background. A longer shutter speed is how the motion blur is created. The picture below shows a figure shaking their head, but other than that movement, the rest of the figure is still. Woodman would have had to have held the camera extremely still, or braced it on something to get the rest of the figure and background so clear.
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| Space2, 1976. |
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| House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, Gelatin silver print, 14.6 x 14.6 cm. |
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| Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976-77, Gelatin silver print, 13.7 x 13.3 cm. |
Her photographs while hauntingly beautiful hole a lot of the unknown. The third image is one that appeals to me as it looks as if the figure is stepping out of the architecture, ripping the wall paper away as she does so. The balance of light and dark and the stillness of the photograph all work in it's favour. It's hard to know what exactly is going on in any of her photographs, but it's a bit of fun guessing.
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