Projecting Touch: Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints”

Abstract

This paper addresses the late work of American photographer Francesca Woodman, produced at the start of the 1980s shortly before her death in 1981. Representing a radical departure from her usual practice of small, barely enlarged silver photography, her late “blueprint” diazotypes point to a shift in Woodman's practice that enables a contextualisation of her practice within the postmodernist concerns of the period. Demonstrating an engagement with issues of identity and self-representation current at that time, Woodman's appropriation of outmoded photographic processes also demonstrates an experimental vein in her practice in which she looked beyond the boundaries of the photographic medium as well as exploring its limits. By addressing her late “blueprints” through the idea of the photographic touch, this paper suggests that in her engagement with the outmoded temporality and space of the “time exposure” (dramatised in the exaggerated production of the large-scale “blueprint”), Woodman's practice should be re-situated at a pivotal moment of change that looks both backwards and forward, its fixation with temporality, duration and time revoking the past at the same time as anticipating the concerns of the photographic future.

Notes

1 Benjamin's essay “A Short History of Photography” (1931) was translated and published for the first time in the US during this period, in Artforum in 1977.

2 Abigail Solomon-Godeau's essay “Just like a Woman” was first published alongside Rosalind Krauss's “Problem Sets” in the exhibition catalogue Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work (Wellesley & New York: Wellesley College Museum and Hunter College Art Gallery, 1986) to accompany the first exhibition of Woodman's work in 1986.

3 See for example exhibition reviews and essays from the 1990s such as Jen Budney's Francesca Woodman and Kathryn Hixon's “Essential Magic”.

4 See Townsend's essay “Scattered in Space and Time” in his Francesca Woodman.

5 For an in-depth discussion of the history and chemistry of the process, see historian of photographic chemistry and process Mike Ware's informative guide Cyanotype.

6 Barbara Kasten's screen cyanotypes and mixed media work of the 1970s explicitly explored the photograph's claim to indexicality; her practice continues to question its claim to truth, and her recent photography's abstract rendering of light and shade has begun to receive more critical attention that is reflected in recent shows in Paris, Germany and the US.

7 For a discussion of the position of so-called “alternative” processes, see Rexer's Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde.

8 See also Shaaf's discussion of the simplicity of the process in Sun Gardens. Here he quotes Robert Hunt from an 1848 edition of The Art Union, in which the author remarks how the simple method and easily predictable results made it attractive “particularly to ladies” (n. 44, 101).

9 For a full discussion of the impact and influence of Atkins' albums see Armstrong's Scenes in a Library, Armstrong and de Zegher's Ocean Flowers and Smith's discussion in The Politics of Focus. Of particular importance is Larry Shaaf's work on Atkins' photography, notably his essay “Anna Atkins' Cyanotypes” and the book Sun Gardens.

10 The first instalment of Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature appeared in June of 1844. See Smith, The Politics of Focus.

11 See di Bello's compelling discussion of these relationships in her Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England.

12 The disciplinary nature of photographic portraiture and its dual “honorific” and “repressive” functions are discussed in Sekula's ground-breaking essay “The Body and the Archive”. Green has also deployed a Foucauldian framework in his essay “On Foucault”.

13 Marsha Meskimmon has argued of the continuing importance for addressing the question of female agency in art by women, particularly in light of poststructuralist critique of notions of authorship in which, as she suggests, the rejection of the subject of knowledge coincided with a historical moment in which “women, and non-white, non-western subjects have claimed their voice.” See her Women Making Art.

14 This piece exists now only as three colour slides that document the installation of the piece at the MacDowell Colony (see Townsend 49–50).

15 I have discussed Woodman's engagement with Stein's writing in my PhD thesis.

16 See for example the essays and documents collected in Campany's The Cinematic. For a discussion of the return to early photographic methods and processes in contemporary work, see Rexer's Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde.