By: Abby Huang

A black and white photo seems ordinary, right? But when you look more closely, you see a 40 year history that has brought experts to study a woman named Francesca Woodman.

Woodman was born in Denver, Colorado to George and Betty Woodman. Art ran through the family’s blood; Woodman’s father was a painter, and her mother made ceramics. Whenever the family when on vacation, it was always to a museum or art gallery.

Woodman was given a camera when she went to a boarding school, and she began experimenting with her medium-format Yashica camera almost immediately. One of Woodman’s earliest works was a self-portrait she made when she was 13 which depicts her in a ghostly presence.

Woodman’s self-portraits look spontaneous to most people, but they were said to very carefully planned. Katarina Jenric says, “She really went into her picture-making in a very deliberate way.”

The way Woodman took the portraits remains a mystery as she is found to be working mainly by herself. She was a true mastermind as she manipulated the shadows and light to work in all her photos.

Woodman took her own life at 22. A friend featured in a documentary made about her admitted that she stopped making and taking pictures in the weeks coming up to her suicide.

In a final journal entry before her death, she had written, “ I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see and show them something different.”

Sources: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211209-francesca-woodman-the-eerie-images-of-a-teenage-genius