In 1972, at the age of 13, Francesca Woodman photographed herself sitting on the end of a sofa at her home in Boulder, Colorado. The room looks like a studio; Woodman's parents were artists, and there's a sliver of easel behind her. A grey blur seems to issue from her half-raised left hand and flood the bottom of the black and white picture like a fog. The blur has been generated partly by the out-of-focus cable release she used to take the photograph; the rest has been achieved in the darkroom. The photographer herself is in focus, but she's buried inside a big cable-knit sweater and has turned her head away so that her darkish blonde hair is all we see. (There's something monstrous and comic about this faceless head, like the hairball Cousin Itt from The Addams Family or the unkempt ghost in Hideo Nakata's film Ringu.) Her right arm is a blaze of light on the arm of the sofa, so overexposed that the hand seems to hover unattached: the only expressive gesture in a picture that is all veils and avoidance.

LRB 20 January 2011 | PDF Download