Francesca Woodman - Keller Corey

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Résumé :
Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was an artist decisively of her time, yet her photographs retain an undeniable immediacy. Thirty years after her death, they continue to inspire a cultlike following of admirers, drawn by the work's dazzling ambiguities and remarkably rich explorations of self-portraiture and the human body in architectural space. Woodman began photographing at the age of thirteen. By the time she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975, she was already an accomplished photographer with a singularly mature and focused approach to her work. At the age of twenty-two, she committed suicide. Woodman might be merely a tragic footnote in the history of photography were it not for the compelling, complex, and artistically resolved body of work she produced in just nine brilliant years. Woodman also left behind questions that have preoccupied critics and scholars ever since: Was she a prodigy, arriving fully formed as a photographer at a very young age, or was she a student, in the early, experimental phase of a promising career? Was she a feminist, or does her investment in the female form signal something else entirely? And to what extent does her biography, cut short, bear relevance to her work? Produced in conjunction with the first major American exhibition of the artist's work in more than two decades, this catalogue is a landmark reconsideration of Woodman for the twenty-first century. Thoughtfully written and richly illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, it provides a fresh overview of her achievement and reflects on why her pictures continue to be so profoundly affective long after their making. The exhibition Francesca Woodman is presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Biographie:
Corey Keller is associate curator of photography at SFMOMA, where she organized the acclaimed exhibition and catalogue Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900.Other exhibitions include i906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures. Henry Wessel: Photographs. and PicturingModernity, the museum's ongoing presentation of work from its world-class photography collection. She has contributed essays to numerous catalogues including, most recently, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a rime of Change. Julia Bryan-Wilson is associate professor of art history at the University of Califomia, Berkeley. Previously she was on the faculties at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era and is a widely published art critic on topics related to feminist, queer, and collaborative art and craft. She has written on Ida Applebroog, Sadie Benning, Carrie Moyer, Yoko Ono, and Sharon Hayes, among others. Jennifer Blessing is curator of photography at the Guggenheim Museum, where she organized Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance and Catherine Opie: American Photographer, among other exhibitions. She has contributed to numerous other museum exhibitions and catalogues including Marina Abramovié's performance series Seven Easy Pieces and Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition.