Francesca, when did you discover that you were an ambitious woman, and how?
When did your mind begin to turn on itself?
When did you realize that these things would make your life as an artist even harder than it would be otherwise?
I visited SFMOMA’s Francesca Woodman retrospective—the most comprehensive exhibition of her work until then—in early 2012. The height of my Woodman obsession had occurred when I was much younger than twenty-two, the age at which Francesca Woodman had jumped from a window and died. By the time I went to see her photographs in person, I was twenty-eight; it was the winter that I was involuntarily hospitalized in rural Louisiana. It was the winter that I was in an outpatient program in San Francisco while trying to keep my full-time job.
Woodman is best known for the self-portraiture that she created as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Common motifs include nudity, reflections, blurred motion, and the decrepit settings of her House series. She is under things and behind things, part of the scenery (wallpaper, fireplace), distorted, long-haired, and pale. It’s hard to see her face. At the exhibition, I was surprised to hear her recorded voice, which was unmemorable to me, and there was video, which I hadn’t been expecting; prior to the retrospective, Woodman had existed for me only as a wraith in black and white. In the exhibit—held in a sterile museum, with standard white walls and plenty of empty space—she came across as cannily ambitious, and fully aware of her own gifts.
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses,” says Susan Sontag in On Photography. I could examine Woodman’s carefully managed self-portraiture to suss out what lies below the surface of her images, and to try to uncover where one can spot the threads of her suicide, like gold glinting in an otherwise-dull tapestry. Suicide demands a narrative, but rarely, if ever, gives one. “Teen Kills Self after Parents Forbid Black Nail Polish,” read one puzzling headline from my childhood. Why black nail polish? Why suicide? I didn’t understand the self-destructive impulse then, but I did later. At fifteen, I kept a list titled “Reasons to Kill Myself” in the back of a journal, perhaps because I understood that a single reason was insufficient. According to one newspaper, Woodman jumped because she was frustrated by her lack of recognition: “Young Genius Kills Self after Provincetown [Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship] Rejection.” (Which was, of course, itself a form of recognition.)
At sixteen, I was chosen to attend a summer program at the California Institute of the Arts, which also made me a California Arts Scholar in the field of creative writing. On the first day of the program, a man stood at the head of the room and unfurled a scroll of names before us: these were the people who had not made it into the program. The following year, in another summer program for the arts where I studied printmaking and drawing, I met a dishwater-blond named Clare who would become my best friend. Clare, I learned, was one of those people who had been on the CalArts scroll the previous year.
I hung my California Arts Scholar medal on a bulletin board in my bedroom, next to a strip of film from the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut. But I am constantly misplacing various symbols of achievement—I have no idea where my diplomas are, or the medal, though I continue to strive for more achievements, and more honors. In exercises designed to discern my primary values, recognition, to my dismay, appears again and again. I care about recognition as much as I care about my own self-regard, in large part because I don’t trust my self-evaluation. I was obsessed with the boy who gave me the film strip from Eyes Wide Shut, but I can’t imagine whether I would have felt the same way if my feelings for him had been requited. (“We mistake just feelings as feelings for love,” a friend once told me.)
Woodman was always, her friend Giuseppe Gallo said, single-mindedly thinking about photography. Never distracted. “Every moment of Francesca’s life,” he said, “was in preparation for a photograph.” One is more easily prepared with an always-ready model, and what subject is more available for exploration than the self? What better stuff to make art of if one is an ambitious artist, which Woodman undoubtedly was? Why not, as a writer, create essays in which I myself appear?
Francesca, what do you think of these photographs?
Do you see what I was trying to do?
I was trying to make myself more real.
During one psychotic episode, without a strict concept of myself or of the world around me, I coped by shooting with an SX-70 Polaroid and a Contax T2 camera. It was essential that the process involve physical film. Even better, instant film meant a tangible and immediate result.
Again, from On Photography: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” To take a photograph, in other words, is to participate in one’s own reality, to be a true member of the world of things. I taped a photograph to my wall; the photograph, which is of the back of my own head, surprised me because I’d forgotten about the birthmark on my neck—a dark brown and smudgy spot exposed by my chronically short hair. To have that mark turn up in a photograph was evidence of a self I remembered. I hadn’t, in my psychosis, forged proof that I was the woman everyone else claimed me to be. After all, the birthmark is a classic signifier of identity. In the Grimms’ tale “The Master Thief,” it’s the bean-shaped birthmark on his shoulder that convinces the master thief’s parents that their son has returned. Even more fundamentally, a birthmark implies that I was once born—that I haven’t always been here. A birthmark signifies one’s entrance into the world.
Self-portraiture provides a certain notion of myself. Almost all the self-portraits I take during severe and prolonged psychosis are blurry and out of focus. Unlike Woodman, I don’t try to create this effect, which happens because I must estimate an accurate focus before stretching my arms out in front of my face. The self-portraits are difficult to parse; they capture facial expressions that make me cringe later, when I see them in lucidity, because I don’t recognize them, and because they are ugly in their attempt to approximate grins. When I examine them now, I wonder why. Why did I cover my face with my hand, particularly when I couldn’t see my face in the lens? Why the grimace? Who is that performance meant for? Jackson Pollock said, “I am interested in expressing, not illustrating my emotions,” but I look at those pictures and see anything but expression. Instead, there is an approximation, or an illustration, of what I believe an emotion should be.
Other self-portraits are shadows—my shadow rising against a hot wall by the butcher’s, or against a cardigan slung over the back of a wooden chair. My mother-in-law told me one Christmas, after another episode of psychosis, that I was like Peter Pan: “You’ve just lost your shadow, and you’ll find a way to stitch it back to your foot.” I marveled at the congruency between that familiar story and the belief that, in death, the soul leaves through one’s feet. I wondered if I’d literally lost my soul as I photographed the silhouetted marks that my body left on the world. The body was there, but something else—something essential—was missing.
When commenting on my ability to function, many point to my first novel as evidence of what I’ve managed to do despite being sick. This does not comfort me, because though I was depressed, often suicidally anxious, and periodically psychotic, in hindsight I call the author of The Border of Paradise a woman who was mostly well. I would have disagreed with this evaluation at the time, but back then I wasn’t aware of just how unwell, both mentally and physically, I could possibly be. Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby, “There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough,” which has not been my experience. After all, prolonged and chronic illness stitches itself into life in a different way than acute illness does. With chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition I can attempt. The absolution from doing more and dreaming big that I experience during surgeries and hospitalization is absent during chronic illness.
During the worst episodes of psychosis, photography is a tool my sick self uses to believe in what exists. The photographs become tools for my well self to reexperience the loss. They are a bridge, or a mizpah—a Hebrew noun referring to the emotional ties between people, and especially between people separated by distance or death—between one self and the other. The well person has the job of translating the images that the sick person has left behind as evidence.
There are perhaps a hundred photographs that I’ve taken in periods of psychosis. I’ve shown very few of them to other people. One particular winter’s worth of images is especially hard for me to sort through, and I consider those photographs to be a peculiar example of what memory can, and cannot, accomplish. I look at those images of the Christmas tree farm, and am immediately thrust back into that place and that time. The anxiety that pervaded those days returns. My body reacts with a fist in the solar plexus and tingling extremities. It reexperiences not the exact psychosis, but the terror that came with the psychosis, much in the way long-faded scars reemerge on my body under stress as ghostly memories made plain.
But there is much that I don’t remember of the wreckage, which I see only now because the woman from the land of acute illness snapped photographs as souvenirs and keepsakes, including portraits of C. in which he is looking into the camera with exhaustion in his thick-lashed eyes and unkempt facial hair. I can’t bear to look at those images now. I don’t need to, because I can see in my mind’s eye the despair in his face. I interpret those pictures of C. as a message of something that I couldn’t see at the time: a missive delivered via the impartial camera, delivered from an external source that wanted me to see how the schizophrenias had damaged the great love of my life.
I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, i.e. some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.
(Said Francesca in a letter.)
But, Francesca, what would obliterate those things in life?
Woodman was twenty-two when she jumped. Critics speak of what she might have done if she’d lived. When an artist dies, the art that never was is often mourned with as much grief as—if not more grief than—the individual themself. The individual, after all, was flesh and blood. It’s the art that’s immortal. Woodman’s body of work, experienced in a museum setting, feels abbreviated. You walk through the final room and find the exit, expecting more.
What did Woodman mean when she suggested the destruction of work, accomplishments, friendships, the “pell-mell” erasure of those things called “delicate”? Beautiful things can be destroyed because they’re obliterated by something else: the ordinariness of an artist’s life is eclipsed by their manner of death. The obliteration can also be gradual. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” explained Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. He was a twenty-seven-year-old rock star when he shot himself, but his death made him an icon. Woodman and Cobain are frequently described as geniuses.
Are you in danger of harming yourself or others?
Do you have a plan?
When I was a lab manager, I was trained in the clumsy art of creating a suicide-prevention contract with potential or current subjects. The contracts were printed on half sheets of white paper. The subject-to-be had to agree not to harm themself. The subject-to-be had to also agree to dial 911 if they felt in imminent danger of doing so. I never had to create such an agreement, but I did wonder about its effectiveness. Was the suicide contract for our behalf or for the subjects’? Were we simply trying to feel as though we were doing something?
I once attended a meeting at San Francisco City Hall at which people were debating whether to install a “suicide net” beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, which would hopefully deter the suicidal and catch attempted suicides. The documentary The Bridge (2006) follows a year of suicides and suicide attempts occurring from that iconic bridge—twenty-four known suicides in all, and many more attempts. A common argument against the net had to do with the aesthetics of the bridge, the familiar silhouette that would be hampered by that kind of addition. I was in favor of the net, but had no idea whether its installation would result in fewer suicides in San Francisco, or even fewer incidents of Golden Gate Bridge jumping in particular. I’d convinced a member of the board to become pronet by saying that because the bridge represented the possibility of suicide, its very existence therefore became a temptation. I compared it to my husband’s former desire to have a gun in the house. If there were a gun in the house, I said, it would be both a temptation and a convenient means of suicide. In 2014, San Francisco voted on the installation of the net. Construction began in 2017 and is expected to be finished in 2021.
By installing the net, the city is saying that it is doing something about the tragedies that occur there. The net is a sort of suicide-prevention contract: Look, we installed a net; we’re holding up our end of the deal, so don’t try it. The Bridge was inspired by a New Yorker article by Tad Friend titled “Jumpers.” Its concluding paragraph reads, “[To build a barrier] would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other; to acknowledge that much of life is lived on the chord, on the far side of the railing.”
Francesca Woodman was a jumper, though not an ordinary one. Most of the lives that end because of leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge are not the lives of famous people. They are not mourned publicly because of the loss of beautiful things that will never be created. No one writes in a magazine or newspaper that our culture is now poorer because those people have died.
Woodman insists in her letter that she would not like to “pell-mell [erase] all of these delicate things.” What remains of her life are, as she calls them, “artifacts,” because the life of breathing and heartbeats is the most delicate thing of all—which we all know, or all pretend to know.
I am older now by over a decade than Francesca Woodman was when she died, and older than I was when I saw the exhibition of her work at SFMOMA. I am still ambitious, but I must be careful about my ambition; illness has distorted my life such that it’s become hard to recognize it as my own. On the phone in 2015 with my insurance representative, I learned that any mental illness is called a “mental nervous condition” under my plan; I stopped receiving disability benefits because “mental nervous conditions” are eligible for twenty-four months maximum. I marvel at how much illness I have experienced in these past five years due to late-stage Lyme disease, how the self before that time would be appalled to see the limitations of my life. All I can do is try to write well and pray to die peacefully. Francesca Woodman never has to watch her star fall, or to renegotiate her ideas of ambition, because she already faced her mortality, and is immortalized in her art.