Francesca Woodman

Hervé Chandès ja Alexis Schawarzenbach ovat toimittaneen ja Rana Dasgupta kääntänyt teoksen valokuvaajasta, joka kuoli nuorena mutta jätti melkoisen jäljen tuotannollaan: Francesca Woodman (Scalo, 1998; ISBN 3-931141-96-9).



Francesca Woodmanin tuotannossa väijyy ikään kuin ennakoiden tulevaa nykyisen selfie-kulttuurin henki. Woodman käytti itseään ja tuttaviaan valokuviensa materiaalina, aloittaen uransa 13-14 -vuotiaana, opiskellen valokuvausta niin USA:ssa kuin ulkomailla. Hän teki itsemurhan vuonna 1981, jolloin hän oli 22-vuotias.

Published in 1992 in Europe and distributed in the U.S., the first book with photographs by Francesca Woodman immediately created great respect for this enigmatic artist.

David Levi Strauss writes in his essay: "The constitutive facts of Francesca Woodman's life are by now well known. We know that she was born in 1958, that she began taking photographs seriously at age thirteen or fourteen and continued this involvement into her twenty-second year, building up, in this brief time, a remarkably coherent and affecting body of work. And we know that on January 19, 1981, just two and a half months before her twenty-third birthday, she took her own life, leaping from a window on the Lower East Side in Manhattan to her death".

This volume, containing many unpublished images, finally allows us to discover the full body of work of this artist, created in Rhode Island, Rome, New York, MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire: self-portraits, mise-en-scenes, nudes, and deeply emotional collage-like images. They all show her intense relation with the camera and her own self, long before this kind of picture-making became fashionable.