Featured: Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman
Hardcover

"Artists who arrive fully formed at a young age always dazzle, and Francesca Woodman was one of the most gifted and dazzling artist prodigies in recent history. In 1972, the 13-year-old Woodman made a black-and-white photograph of herself sitting at the far end of a sofa in her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her face is obscured by her hair, light radiates from an unseen source behind her out at the viewer through her right hand. This photograph typifies much of what would characterize Woodman's work to come: a semi-obscured female form merging with or flailing against a somewhat bare and often dilapidated interior. In an oeuvre of around 800 photographs made in just nine years, Woodman performed her own body against the textures of wallpaper, door frame, baths and couches, radically extending the Surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun and creating a mood and language all her own. In the 30 years since her untimely death, Woodman has gained a following among successive generations of artists and photographers, a testament to her work's undeniable immediacy and enduring appeal Amid a renewed intensification of interest in Francesca Woodman, this volume is published for a major touring exhibition of her photographs and films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Containing many previously unpublished photographs, it is the definitive Francesca Woodman monograph."









Francesca Woodman's Notebook
Boxed softcover notebook

"The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerizing self-portraits. In 1977 she returned to Italy, studying in Rome on a year-long RISD honors program. During this tenure, Woodman found five tattered school exercise books, printed in 1906, side-stapled and inscribed in fine cursive penmanship with notes from physics lectures or poems in English and Italian. To these evocative objects, Woodman--already fully formed as the photographer we recognize and admire today--added her characteristic black-and-white photographs, either as small paper prints or as prints made on transparent film that allows the writing beneath to show through, further embellishing them with her own captions or remarks. This facsimile edition of one of these notebooks was selected for publication by Woodman’s mother and father as an artist’s book of particular beauty and revelatory content that provides unprecedented insight into the emphatically narrative logic of Woodman’s photography. Housed in a lightweight printed box, it includes an afterword by George Woodman, Francesca’s father, that contextualizes the work within the photographer’s artist’s book production."






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