Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman’s brooding body of thirty, tiny photographs on view in this unassuming solo exhibition depict the artist, her friends in New York, or fellow students at RISD in the 1970s—common enough to her practice, but these works specifically come from a moment when the artist became keen on “trying her hand” at fashion photography. What emerged was a subversive meditation on how the feminized figure is variously enhanced and drowned by the cloaks and curves of fashion imagery and its coded imperatives. Across several black-and-white photographs, such as Untitled, New York (N.325), 1979–80, there’s a repeating juxtaposition of female models and animal pelts, each arranged in similarly crooked poses. Rather than wearing their furs, the women mimic them in a haunting conflation of subject and object. Imitation is the sincerest expression of aspiration, they’re haunted by the compulsion to flatten oneself into an image or object for consumption.

Elsewhere, her figures tussle with the limitations of composition and photography’s imperative to contain and fix a view. A green-suited girl bends at a painful angle to partially reflect herself in a mirror in Untitled, New York (N.408), 1979, or claws up the side of a wall in Untitled, New York (N.409), 1979, as if desperate to escape these images. These rarely exhibited works confirm that given more time, Woodman would likely have become a photographer who transcended genre and the boundaries of embodied beauty so rigorously policed by the business of fashion. The little photographs whisper their truths, and with the right kind of ears they could break your heart.