Musée Magazine Issue No. 11 - Vanity | Page 26

Gingeras looks at a portfolio of images found after Woodman’s death. Inside thecover of this portfolio,
“Francesca Woodman for Deborah Turbeville” is etched in pencil. The first five images arecaptioned
with the following “professional plea”:
call me as soon as
you can. I am
anxiously awaiting
your reply
call collect 401 274 4184
Gingeras also points to Man Ray as “perhaps the most important reference point when it comes to discussing the issue of ‘fashion’ and its relationship to Woodman’s autonomous art practice. He was able
to infuse his fashion shoots and portrait commissions with the formal and conceptual concerns that
were central to his ‘real’ art practice.” Woodman goes a step further than Turbeville and Ray in pushing the artistic parameters generally imposed by fashion clients.Often playing both photographer and
model in her fashion images (highly unusual in the industry), she fixes surrealist elements into every
photo: hands or feet suggest fleeting moments of contact with taxidermied animals, her body climbs
the side of a wall, plays with draped textiles, and seems to float over a piano.
Seeing what Turbeville and few other photographers had achieved, inspired Woodman’s thirst for
dual success in fineart and fashion. In wondering whether Woodman would have eventually gained
real weight in the fashion world, Gingeras quotes American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag: “...
to be beautiful also means measuring up to a norm or a rule (‘fashion’)”, norms and rules that Woodman would most likely have challenged and redefined for herself. Woodman’s inability to resist self
performance in her fashion images also betrays her fine art background, which always included an
interest in “fanciful dress”.
The masters of her time walked a fine balance between fine art and fashion photography. Society’s perceived needs and ideas of beauty have expanded with advancing technology, which easily turns desires
to needs and promotes more diversity in taste and preference. Beauty has been intellectually dissected
and immortalized in everything from literature and religion, to paintings and photographs. Technology
has further commercialized that adulation, even creating lucrative careers for professional narcissists
who promote endless variations of beauty: a phenomenon that insists self marketing is a respectable art.
Vanity is no longer seen as just a fixation with one’s many reflections; it has acquired positive connotations of self assurance and openness, considered marketable skills in the social media sphere.
The focus on vanity’s virtue has eclipsed traditional tales that warn of its vices, but the traps are still
there. Constant and habitual access to our physical reflections, along with growing capabilities to edit
and distort those reflections, increasingly blur the distinction between escape and reality. As an escape,
vanity nurtures unrealistic expectations of the self, all the more easily transformed to the modern eye’s
fancy, with digital paint brushes to airbrush every pixel and pore. The balance between healthy doses
of self love and excessive self worship is a sensitive pendulum, with Narcissus and Dorian Gray looming on the other side of the mirror, or camera. The face in the portrait begins taking over when the ego
begins to bask in the attention attracted by the two dimensional persona.
Perhaps as Woodman fell deeper into the reality she scripted on film, actual reality fell shorter in contrast. By putting herself in front of the camera and becoming a subject in her own staged environments
of haunting beauty and skewered reality, the artist physically became the otherworldly reflection envisioned in her mind, reflections which suggest a strong desire to withdraw from the real world, while
simultaneously exhibiting her body as a remote glimpse into the her preconscious. Each black and white
square of print projects all the different reflections of Woodman’s body and mind, dropped into seemingly random, minimalist backgrounds that reinforce the sense of being led into a d ream within a dream.
Can the artist play him or herself and wade in the lake of Narcissus without drowning? Sometimes the
artist wants to drown, in the way actors often go to extremes to embody the physiology and psyche
of their characters. Woodman’s work is considered timeless because of its purity in that sense: the fact
that the landscapes she created were entirely self constructed and authentic to her vision, a total immersion into her microcosm of disturbed paradise. Slowly emerging posthumous works from Woodman’s short lived career, curated by her family, continue to create a space for her in the present, and are
now immortalized in books and galleries, graced with eternal lingering attachments to her shadow, to
be found somewhere between the world she left behind and the world that keeps her alive.
Previous Spread:. ©Francesca Woodman. Untitled, New York, 1979-1980.

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