Francesca (after Somerville, Missouri)

She filled old ledgers with her scratchy handwriting, ‘pirouettes of speech,’ playing with language,  ‘Steinwriting,’ as she called it.   A ‘just-breath summer,’ ‘sand thoughts all  from sea,’    ‘ grey monotones and fog.’   Sometimes writing in her journals in the third person. Her attitude toward her photography –  dire, urgent, passionate –  full of  insecurity, self-doubt. In many of the entries there are notes on photos she plans to stage. It is 1973 and  ‘I think when I get home I should take pictures of objects: purse, hand, etc. “clues to a lost woman.”‘ To scour her pictures – playing dress-up, staging photos – the performative nature of her work. Among stained, peeling walls she seems to dissolve – animal furs and plants blurred or obscured, glass shards, a careful arrangement – in a darkened corner. She might like to edge out of the frame, leaving only fragments of herself, the boundaries of pictorial space, Woodman preternaturally gifted. She becomes her own specimen,  crawls into a curio,   Three Kinds of Melon in Four Kinds of Light,  pushed. She became fluent in Italian.  Read all of Proust. Listened to Bach. When she was a girl her father gave her an old Yashica camera. Self-Portrait at Thirteen, sitting on a bench, a bulky cable-knit sweater, her face behind a curtain of hair.  A charming eccentric who spoke in a quick, high-pitched voice, donned theatrical ensembles and rode a beribboned bike. A penniless artist in a cold-water flat in New York’s East Village. At odds with straight photography. The quiet act of solving photographic problems.  She filled the studio with props.  A dissenter of form. To create contrived, dramatic situations. Not moving, to exhibit her work, her career – she was still experimenting with technique and composition – fast enough. Loss and longing.  Longing that was loss but never lost. A career of less than a decade, infused with — printed, a year after her death – Some Disordered Interior Geometries. Pictures fielding poetry,  diary entries, handwritten notes.