Francesca Woodman

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Last week I went to an exhibition of photographs by Francesca Woodman at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. I'm really glad I did because the work is wonderful.

The pictures are from between 1972 and 1981. Woodman only lived to be 22 and most of the images are the kind that a lot of teenage girls take, a kind of self-exploration through photography, but Woodman does it exceptionally well. Her photographs are meticulously arranged and often feature herself or her female friends posing in dreamlike scenarios. It's a narrative suffused with the language of death: faces are turned away, obscured or blurred, bodies disappear into their surroundings, literally merging with walls, like in this one:
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...or here, identities displaced:

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You can tell that Woodman loved surrealist and Victorian photography and I think probably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland too. This picture could be an illustration for it:
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But this is my favourite:

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My first thought on seeing this photograph, was that it presents an inversion of reality. Obviously, the animals are stuffed while Woodman is only posing. But in the frozen moment, it is the animals who appear to be alive, while Woodman seems to be dead. In this respect, photography is a remarkable equalizer.
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