spoken by her father, painter George Woodman and
mother, ceramicist Betty Woodman. From 1965 to
1966, when Woodman was in second grade, the
family lived in Florence, Italy. The family purchased
a farmhouse in Antella, outside Florence, where they
returned each summer. In 1972, Woodman was
enrolled in boarding school at Abbot Academy in
Andover, Massachusetts. Here she was not only a
frequent visitor to the Addison Gallery of American
Art but she met an instructor who proved pivotal to
her artistic development. The instructor, a dynamic
art teacher named Wendy MacNeil, later taught at
the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) when she
again mentored Woodman.
The young girl flourished at boarding school and
photography began to dominate her life. Accord-
ing to Ann Gabhart’s biographical essay on Wood-
man, the artist slept in her closet so she could use
her room as a photography studio (Gabhart 1986,
53). Although her parents brought her back to
Boulder to finish high school, she was already
defining her artistic lexicon, fusing the passions of
female adolescence with a growing visual vocabu-
lary. Acknowledging the rarity of prodigies in the
field of photography, Abigail Solomon-Godeau
wrote, ‘‘Produced from early adolescence until the
time of her death, Woodman’s photography is the
work of a prodigy’’ (Gabhart 1986, 14).
Woodman moved to Providence to attend
RISD, where she was a flamboyant student and
artist who demonstrated a remarkable sophistica-
tion and self-awareness. She explored Victorian
novels and female authors such as Colette, Virginia
Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir. Woodman also
admired the work of Duane Michaels and adopted
his formula for working photographs in serials
with incorporated texts. She staged her photo-
graphs inside run-down interiors, such as aban-
doned houses or old factories. For Woodman, the
photograph itself constitutes a space, small and
secret, which disclosed some private event.
The naked female body, often her own, became
the center of her compositions. Atmosphere and
movement often allowed this body to appear and
disappear into the wallpaper, behind the fireplace,
and into the corners of the rooms. Woodman
inserted the paraphernalia of sexuality and fetish-
ism into these scenes, achieving a disorienting effect
not unlike early Surrealists. She explored the
female form hidden, trapped, diminishing, but
also liberated, suggesting the elusiveness of identity
and the temporality of existence itself. The matur-
ity of her work was acknowledged, when, during
her freshman year, Woodman was given a solo
exhibition at the Addison Gallery.
Her third year at RISD was spent in Rome, as
part of the school’s Honors Program. She found an
old spaghetti factory where she photographed at
night and became involved with the activities of a
Surrealist bookshop, the Libreria Maldoror. There
a solo exhibition of Woodman’s work was mounted
in1978.Shealsohadworkacceptedintoanexhibi-
tion at Galleria Ugo Ferranti.
When Woodman returned to Providence, she gave
her senior exhibition the prophetic title,Swan Song,
and finished her last year in one semester. She moved
to New York City in January 1979. Freed from the
confines of class assignments, Woodman began ex-
ploring a wider scope of materials and formats. She
projected slides onto light-sensitive paper forming
long diptychs and triptychs. Some of these new
mural-size blueprints were accepted into the show
Beyond Photography 80at The Alternative Museum
in Soho. Around this time, Woodman sent portfolios
of her work to various fashion photographers, in-
cluding Deborah Turbeville, but nothing came of
these efforts. The well-known New York photogra-
phygalleryDanielWolfInc.includedWoodmanin
two exhibitions, and she was chosen by Synapse
Press to create an artists’ book. The book was hand-
written in an old mathematics primer, with photo-
graphs filled with allusions to her dead grandmother,
skeletons, and mirrors. She titled itSome Disordered
Interior Geometriesand dedicated it to the proprie-
tors of the Libreria Maldoror.
The summer of 1980, Woodman applied and was
accepted as a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in
Peterborough, New Hampshire. Much of her time
was spent reading Proust’sRemembrance of Things
Past and producing the ten-part series Birches.
Back in New York, Woodman planned a trip to
Rome but, instead, jumped from her apartment
window on 29 January 1981. During her brief life
she had been featured in eight group shows, three
solo exhibitions, and had a book of photographs
published one month before her death.
Several years after her death, Ann Gabhart of
Wellesley College mounted Woodman’s first retro-
spective. Rosalind Krauss of Hunter College con-
tributed an essay to the accompanying catalogue.
Since that time, Woodman’s work has been included
in numerous exhibitions and received growing criti-
cal attention, including a major monograph pub-
lished on the occasion of the 1998 exhibition at the
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.
It is tempting to exaggerate the weight of Wood-
man’s limited body of work and speculate what
might have been created had she lived. Ultimately,
Woodman remains like Nadja, the title character in
one of her favorite novels by Andre ́Breton, who wasWOODMAN, FRANCESCA