Francesca Woodman jumped from a window in my apartment in 1981, twelve years before I was born. She was only twenty-two years old. But I don’t want to mislead you: her suicide is not what makes her interesting to me. Her work is what attracts me, what convinced me to buy this particular apartment in this particular building, which is otherwise not in actual fact conveniently sited for my few (fewer all the time) needs. I hoped that by literally inhabiting her former space, I could better understand the importance of her work to me, to my work, to the conceptual framework through which by careful study I have half-deciphered the world.
Woodman took a lot of photographs of herself, often in the nude but not always. In many of her photographs there’s some kind of distortion of the fabric of reality – most often by using very long exposures at a time when using very long exposures was unusual for the type of portraiture she undertook. The effect is almost always spectral, blurred, but never exhibitionist or sensational – precisely the opposite. In almost every one of her auto-portraits, Francesca Woodman seems to be trying to figure out how to disappear. The implication is that she’s not altogether comfortable with the fact of her existence, but I’m not sure that’s right.
Critically adored post-mortem, in roughly the way outlined in Nick Drake’s song ‘Fruit Tree’, Woodman while alive neither sought nor fled what we are legally bound in late-cap Amerika to call success. She devoted herself to her work. Her work both sustained and depleted her. This is always the way of it. The only thing special about the manner of her dying was its apparent lack of motivation. This, too, is always the way of it.
I don’t as a rule like to say the quiet part loud, but have found via experience that not doing so risks a risk I cannot (dare not?) risk: that one among you might miss the point. If you’re wondering why Francesca Woodman chose to take her life on a cold winter day in 1981, I’m more than happy to provide the answer.