ABSTRACT
A monocolor video created by photographer Francesca Woodman, which could be titled "Francesca" had she bothered to title it, plays at the boundaries of identifiable figuring. Written on the paper is her name, Francesca, that appellation that she tears in order to emerge into visibility. But in the 'Francesca' video, the violence of emergence is rendered even more spectral because the figure that emerges is stripped of identity, tagged by a name as if she were a specimen. Francesca Woodman stands as an artist, as a photographer, who never made her mark but nevertheless left her mark and whose work is both cultic and occult. The staging of mourning that takes place in Woodman's Blueprint for a Temple, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, and Portrait of a Reputation is never a personal scene of mourning. Looking at these images we do not 'get to know' Francesca Woodman.
