Francesca Woodman, on being an Angel

In forums, when not classified by camera model, users are presented with genres, like Landscape, Portrait, etc. That is how camera users see Photography, with documentation as the general category. We are just recording things for future memory.

Of course there is also a third way, to see it historically: Naturalism, Realism, Avant-Garde, Conceptual, Globalization. You might refine it, or adopt another sequence. Surrealism sprang out of the Avant-Garde beginning of the 1920s in Paris and had a remarkable long life, moving to America and New York in 1940 and lasting till the 1970s, with F. Woodman as one of its last heralds. 

Meanwhile Photography  had entered the MOMA in NY and had become an art.

When I began to approach critically Woodman's work, I was struck by the lack of awareness shown by the first reviews. Essentially she was dubbed a feminist, or at best a body artist, who had died in turbulent times. They had missed her seminal Italian year, when she bloomed from art pupil to full blown artist. The fact that she reached her accomplishment here in Rome at 18een, while dying at 21 in NY didn't make things easier.

It was only years later that criticism began a more refined approach. Meanwhile she had reached somehow cult status, both in the US and Italy, being dubbed the 'Rimbaud' of Photography. This put her indirectly in the Surrealist sphere, Rimbaud having been among the main inspirers of Breton and comrades. Woodman has stated explicitly her admiration of Breton's 'Nadja'.

Woodman is reported as saying "Vorrei che le parole avessero con le mie immagini lo stesso rapporto che le fotografie hanno con il testo in Nadja di André Breton" ("I would like words to have the same relationship with my images as the photographs have with the text in Nadja by André Breton").

 But among her influences there was also surrealist photogs. Duane Michals, Diane Tuberville, and the Man Ray of the Meret Oppenheim's pictures. Delving even earlier she was inspired by Gothic Fiction, Roman Baroque and Bernini's statues. Some of her studies on compressed perspective remind very much of Giotto. She might have seem him during her yearly holidays as a child near Florence. Giotto invented perspective, what luck for a future photographer to get it from the horse's mouth.

Francesca began her activity v. early at 13, spending  her time at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was also immersed in Italian art every summer by her parents, both artists, and she spent her second year of primary school in Italy, until she reached Rome with her RISD grant for 1977-78.

It's at the Libreria Maldoror, a minuscule Surrealist bookshop in the heart of Medieval Rome, where she had her first show, that I must have crossed her. Nearby the wonderful Baroque Piazza Navona   you could both find Maldoror, the occupied building of the 'femministe' (Women Liberation Front) , and the second hand shops where she chose her neorealist clothes. I remember that the slogan with those ladies was: 'Il corpo e' mio e me lo gestisco io'- the body is mine and I will Take care of it". A program that Francesca was going to adopt entirely, by being her favorite model.

She was also inspired by the Italian conceptual artists at Galleria Ferranti,  nearby Maldoror, and later Postavantgarde painters who let her use one of the large rooms in an abandoned Factory. Thus, she got in touch with Sabina Mirri (painter), Edith Schloss (poet), Giuseppe Gallo (painter) , Enrico Luzzi and Suzanne Santoro. I was acquainted with the first three, all remarkable young artists at the time.

 In the factory at S. Lorenzo she shot  her seminal 'On being an Angel' work in Rome, when just 18. A whole constellation of influences was in place, but nevertheless her work was far more original than her critics initially made it after her death in 1981, when she wasn't there anymore to correct their hits and misses about her. She could be a cultured artist and yet deceptively simple too, playing a Victorian innocent maid, a clever child the way Charles Liddel's Alice was. 

The only Art Book  she made in her short life was 'Some Disordered Interior Geometries' appeared in 1981, a few days before her death. Her parents have given access to only 700 pictures, all outstanding but her estimated production from 13 to 22 has been estimated to 10,000.  Even given for granted that a photographer must always select his/her work, we know therefore a v. little part of her work. Her work is kept by the Woodman Estate. Some 170 are being sold through galleries. The known production therefore poses a problem.

The majority of her pictures are from contact sheets of 6x6 cameras, notably an old Speed Graphic, and a Rolleiflex. The SG allows multiple formats too.

The contact shots being v. small and square confer both intimacy and a confined  space to the subject - only in her later years she planned an installation of large photographs, an installation simulating the friezes of a Greek Temple).

I related in a first post how I was sent an illustrated invitation, by her. I could make out a square with a naked body exposed to the full sunshine  from a factory window. And this reminded me later of Bernini, The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa, in Rome. Did she see it, or was it a personal rediscovery of how to tell pictorially a female orgasm?

An invitation sent to me: therefore I feel authorised to use images here for learning purposes.

Religious and sexual drives have one and the same origin  according to Bataille and other French Surrealists working towards Convulsive Beauty and a new History of Eroticism. Thus there is a common iconography across cultures. There are also common interdicts.

Without stating it so explicitly Freud posited it with its fundamental enquiry on dreams and the incest complex, when the child goes through a mirror experience because of the denial of his sexual drive, towards the mother or the  father. His Ego doubles and splits, in order  to avoid what Lacan will call 'The Thing' - the forbidden one.

The theme of mirrors and splitting is omnipresent in Francesca.

Hysteria was also part of the constellation, and was the main study at the Salpétrière hospital where Breton had been a nurse: were transe, orgasm, and religious ecstasy one and the same thing? Breton took an interest, because he believed that the sublimation of the sexual drive would have made art revolutionary: 'la Beaute' sera convulsive ou ne sera pas'.

By visiting each Summer Florence and her public Renaissance Gallerie, Uffizi and Pitti, Francesca must have been well aware that an excess of light was akin to the visitation of an Angel, and the total awareness of the artist, visited by inspiration. Nakedness in the Renaissance was also a metaphor of truth.

As Dr. Eva Rus remarks in her paper, the theme of the mirror is indeed omnipresent both in the work of F Woodman and other Female Liberation's authors. It is a theme that both frees the body and protects it with mirrored, multiple identities. It can also encage however.

In Feminist parlance, by exposing her naked body to a mirror, she re-appropriates it. She echoes male desire, but she also detaches herself from it.

Both David Bate and Eva Rus have discussed the implications of this important theme. It is a counter to the paradox that Breton and he early  Surrealists  had come against with their theories about Woman and sexuality, both a Goddess and a public woman, with Sadism and Courteous Love taken in the same stride.

Rus mentions that by her work,  Francesca was speaking for women, not just for a woman, playing with male desire, but not ending in it, exploring instead womens' sexuality, and identity down to the unspeakable, and the excessive (Rus). 

One's own shadow, duplication, wish to disappear, and condensation of dream figures are all part of the Surrealist imaginary, suggested by Freud. You can all find them in Francesca's figures. She played with the whole range of the Freudian symptoms to reenact myths. So we go from the passive interpretation of the unconscious drive by the early surrealists a' la Nadja, to active impersonation of dream figures by Francesca - the mark of genius! 

In some pictures one wonders if turning rapidly about herself she didn't achieve a trance like a dervish, and disappearance into space - blending the frame and the object in another dimension.

Despite the excess, let me remind that Francesca has aptly described her work as solving visual ideas as if they were equations 

 "I had this idea to illustrate physically literary metaphors  and to make physical metaphors for moral ideas (the reputation). However by working slowly at other projects, I lost the peculiarity of this idea and I came out with a group of images that didn't illustrate any specific concept, but are the story of someone who is exploring an idea […] Let's  follow a figure who tries to solve the idea as if it were a mathematic problem, and to fit it inside an equation. Two months later […] I was back to the original theory for illustrating 'Self-deceit' […] the thing that I found most interesting was the feeling that the figure, more than hiding from itself, was absorbed by a thick and humid atmosphere".

Do you understand the description? Visual artists are often deceptively simple, but they cannot explain what they choose to illustrate in another way.  This is how I basically see her work, since at the time I was a performer myself. First you empty the scene, the physical space around you and in your mind. Then you begin testing visual hypotheses in this virtual space. You use chance associations, even dreams  to suggest the solution, how things must fit spatially.

In Self-Deceit the object of the camera, the model, literally navigates between two mirrors, the second being the camera, and in  this virtual space it becomes again a subject - with multiple directions and identities it can choose from.

The camera however is not only a mirror but a a perspective machine.  For Francesca thus the problem, as for every photog, must have been to fit a 3D space in the bidimensional plane, and in her medium format a  6x6 square at that. 

In some shots her caged body  acts to as the bridge between the illusory three dimensions of the perspective and the plane of the photo. Often the frame beheads her, as in the first picture, and here:

It immediately reminded me of the problem faced by Francis Bacon, when fitting a soft blob of a body, a monster inside a perspective cube, drawn with sharp lines, cutting as blades.

Francesca could do the same by fitting a mirror at the end of the frame and by moving rapidly in front of the objective with slow shutter speeds.  "Me and Francis Bacon and all those Baroques are all concerned with making something soft wiggle and snake around a hard architectural outline." So I wasn't wrong after all.

Again, did she use the rapid movement just to disappear, or to achieve some sort of transference through the looking glass, like Alice?

Let me end here with one of her most interesting pictures, where she transforms herself like Daphne  into  a tree, in a pond in Providence, USA. You can easily compare it to Bernini's work, which Francesca must have seen while in Rome.

In symbolic terms the scene is interpreted as the nymph transforming herself into a tree, to flee a rape by Apollo. It might also be interpreted as another metaphor of desire imagined by Bernini, where woman becomes again unconstricted nature, to escape male desire. Is that what Francesca had in mind with her Providence surprising picture? Or did she want to be"absorbed by a thick and humid atmosphere" and disappear in a protective womb?

Besides the psychological interpretation, as photogs. we might wonder how Woodman solved the technical problems. Where did she place her Speedgraphic, in the water, on a tripod? Did she frame exactly the roots under which she would then have placed her naked body like Daphne? Did she use flash lights? What a fascinating way to work, for a girl who was just 18, and yet already so mature.

So we know a few things now about Francesca's very original  approach to photo work, but in the next instalment I would like to explore better her symbolic world with Dr. Eva Rus from the U. of Birmingham. I found it to be a most fitting paper about Woodman,  after I read so many mundane comments that missed the artist, and only described the woman.

Francesca went so deep in her photographic performances and metaphors that it is difficult to imagine anyone as her successor - although she has many imitators.  Perhaps that explains too her cryptic statement before she took her life. She was really an angel who departed before people took notice of her, except a few fellow-artists.

"I have parameters and my life at this point is similar to the sediments of an old cup of coffee, and I would rather die young, preserving what has been done, instead of confusedly rubbing out all these delicate things,

She threw herself from a skyscraper in NY,  after a long depression, insufficiently cured by analysis, allegedly because of a grant application having been rejected.  

Others mentioned she had wanted to become a Fashion Photographer, like her admired Tuberville. Perhaps Vogue rejected her? -  an issue complicated by problems with her boyfriend.

My next enquiry would rather be if in her 'descente aux enfers', descent into hell, she had not rather reached something monstrous, a figure of the unconscious which was unbearable, like those wrathful deities that Tibetan Buddhism tries to exorcise and exalt at the same time. This was the monster in 'Yet another leaden sky':

  Francesca could use elegant metaphors, like the momentous arrival of a turtle in a room. Her double hides from it, and  is literally cornered by the monster in a shortened perspective, and as a result it loses its face. It wears the black veils of melancoly. It is an emblem that needs to be decoded, and yet keeps a high degree of ambiguity.

Notes:

1. I have avoided nudity, which is difficult with F. Woodman, to respect the guidelines set by my tentative sponsors, Amazon and Google. On another plane, belonging to the same generation of Francesca, we can both have a (sad) laugh at it. By a paradox you can see all the pictures of her lovely body, by doing a Google search :)

2. I propose you to solve an enigma. Because of her short life, and because she worked with film (120 format mostly) I cannot be sure if we see now her actual prints, or negatives that were printed by the Woodman Estate. This would also tell us how much she postprocessed in a film darkroom.

My impression is that she did just contact sheets, and solved all the problems before pushing the shutter button. That is, she used slow shutter and double exposure to achieve her disappearing acts. The S. Lorenzo lofts with big industrial windows would have offered all the natural light she needed.
Keep in mind that I have somewhat enlarged the original 6x6 size to better analyze the details. In the 'Daphne' shot, the contour  of the tree seems to have been relighted, since it has a kind of otherwordly glow. Relighting however was standard processing in film times.

3. The bare facts of her life by Wikipedia

Sony A7, or the Lego FF System

When the Sony A7 was introduced it made the effect of a bomb, in sites such as DPR. The dream of all the Planet's geeks had been fulfilled: to fit a 24x 36 sensor in the body of a compact

I was myself surprised and alarmed: had I invested in a system like m4/3 which had no future?

The price of the bodies between $ 1500 and 2000 was indeed very close to the E-M1, $ 1300, while resolution on paper was twice as much.

A massive sales factor is that while the Sony A7 had almost no native lenses (5 to be honest) it could take with adapters the whole Sony Alpha range, the E NEX range, and hear, hear, all the FF legacy beauties of the past, with adapters soon to be made by the Chinese. At their native focal range.

So , if you are familiar with mirrorless cameras, Sony aspired to become a universal digital back, because its short distance to flange allowed them to accommodate any FF35 lens, with no need  to correct the crop factor which other mirrorless systems have (as high as 2x, in the case of m4/3) with a focal reducer.

And although native FE lenses made by Zeiss are mostly expensive, in the specific case of the Zeiss 35mm FE, price and size € 600 are comparable with the Olympus 17mm while resolution allowed is almost the double.

So this is the equation: a win-win. Or is it? Karel Van Wolferen, an outstanding photog. who is testing legacy beauties on the A7r reports that when he went at Yodobashi, the main Tokyo shop, there was no crowds to tear an A7 from his hands.

From early tests it had indeed emerged what was the curse of 35FF mirrorless: most legacy lenses below 35mm, are unusable because of the aberrations due to both the short distance to flange, and big size of the sensor. 

It is not difficult to understand that once you substitute the flat plane of film with 3D electronic wells the extreme angles of light rays hitting them don't fill them and reach their bottom.

 It's a geometric problem, which affects the edges of the frame, with sometime heavy effects:  light falloff, and colour shift at the edges. Leica and Voigtlanders like the 15mm and 12mm became unusable. Some 21mm SLR lenses keep up the fight, but they are rare and in between.

At any rate you can't buy or adapt anything, with eyes closed. That is exactly what Karel Van Wolferen keeps on testing: each and every lens, on a case by case basis, bless him. Indeed early tests show, that below 35mm, very few lenses can be saved. You also need some very precise adapters.

Note meanwhile that the Sony A7 is the first digital FF to have the same size of the Leica M. No mean achievement!

Leica however introduced microlenses on the edges of the sensor to offset the slanted rays of light. It works quite well with Leica lenses, remarkably with Wide Angles. For Sony however the problem is to offset quite a number of unpredictable lenses of all kinds. Hence the approach case by case of Van Wolferen.

By comparison there is no such problem at the edges on m4/3 and APS sensors with short register, because they cut off the bad edges. So the problem becomes: is there a true advantage in adopting FF35 as a general format? Or is it better suited only for very specific genres, like Portrait and Landscape?

For Landscape there is a solution of course, but it is an expensive one. Native Lenses, like the v. expensive Zeiss FE 55mm Touit series, that will set you back by $ 1500. That of course gave me pause for thinking, and that explains the prudence of Japanese customers.

Main features of the different models

All the three A models are issued with the same frame, not taller or wider than a Leica M. The ambition is clearly to be a modern replacement at half the price, although the dSLR shape gives also the hint that this could be a replacement for cropped mirrorless, which have the same shape and slightly smaller size.

Sony has also reused sensors, probably  in order to keep prices down, but they are still the best in the industry anyway. You can find the A7 sensors in the Sony A99 and the A37.

The bodies have the same Tri-Nav wheels of the NEX 7, in addition to the Mode dial. One for EV compensation while the front and rear dials adjust shutter speed and aperture, and you can swap functions between dials.

Luckily they have adopted the menu system of Sony dSLR (A37), instead of the mind-boggling one the NEX. The A7 have their fair share of buttons, with two function ones, and others that are reconfigurable, so the camera can be set to a photographer's needs.

Imaging Resource did a thorough comparison with the  best models of the industry and there is no doubt that Sony's sensors at the top of the resolved detail. Check here the A7 and here the A7r for comparisons with other top cameras.

To summarize: the Sony have more or the same resolution of a Nikon D800 top of line in half the size!

So there is some substance to the claim the A7 to be the New Leica. Same size, best resolution and top German lenses - Zeiss 35/2.8 goes 1320 lines full open!  according to Roger Cicala. of Lensrentals.

Where the Sony A seems to be still lacking, but that could change, is in the AF speed. Only the A has CDAF+PDAF, and thus good tracking, while the Ar has only CDAF and thus is slower than its sibling. 

According to Lensrentals the A7r resolution with the 35/2.8 Zeiss is the top of the industry. 

Cicala however tested it also with adapted Canon lenses and the Sony A7r beats the Canon 5d bodies when mounting their own Canon lenses!

This might be explained by the lack of AA filter, and the rumored offset microlenses in the A7r, as well as the gapless array of its new sensors.

OTH the Sony Ar doesn't have the front curtain electronic shutter of the A, which allows to attenuate the loud plonk of the shutter., and its alleged shutter shock. 

Flash synchro in the A is 1/160 instead than 1/125 in the A7r, and drive mode is faster, about 5 fps instead of 4 fps in the Ar. 

RAW recording times are allegedly slow, and both cameras take their time to wake up.
Another CON for both cameras is the lack of IBIS - in camera stabilization.

My temporary conclusion: to reach full resolution you must be a better photographer than with my Olympus OM-D because of the unwanted blur and loss of resolution that will happen far easier with a larger sensor than with smaller, cropped sensors. 

Simply because a bigger resolution requires a steadier hand, or a tripod, while there is no general stabilization to lean on. 

DOF  also is less forgiving in 24x36. In a portrait if you focus on the eyes, the tip of the nose might be OOF .

courtesy Meicw, flickr

Consider also that the Olympus OM-D have almost twice the operational performance of the Sony. The Jpeg engine of the OM-D is also so good that it's difficult to tell the 16 Mpx resolution  apart from the A's 24 Mpx. You can detect a difference only in the Ar, which at 36Mpx, has more than twice as many pixels as the OM-D.

So is it worth it? If you work with Stock Agencies exacting at least 20 Mpx for landscapes, certainly. For Journalism and Fashion, which rely on content, or even Marriage, I am unconvinced. An OM-D or a Fuji X with their great per pixel resolution might be enough, and operate faster. Stock wise, you can always uprez your pictures.

There's however a question looming. Have the cropped mirrorless reached limits to growth with the 16 Mpx Sony sensor?

Did Sony change format because it  saw that it couldn't break the 16 Mpx limit on a small sensor, without getting less resolution, like it actually happened  with the NEX 7?

So will in the future the difference in resolution between cropped and FF formats tend to accentuate?  That's the investment decision to consider. Which lenses to get should be the main consideration: cropped or FF35? You can't duplicate the investment, with the current prices!

Courtesy Sushicam, flickr. A7.

There is also the A7s, which has chosen a third way. To downgrade to 12 Mpx in order to achieve and even better Dynamic Range, and the extraordinary sensitivity of 504,000 ISO. Technical data being still missing I might review it in a further post.

Finally a last consideration. By the various reviews, especially the one at Imaging-Resource, there is no way that the A7s are going to compete with top dSLR, the latter being too fast in operational speed. So Sports might be a forbidden territory.

However if you check the Imaging-Resources comparison, the Sony sensors are the highest resolving of all, so here is the paradox. A camera for enthusiasts that beats in resolution the Canons and Nikons top of the line, while not being bigger than an Olympus, or a Fuji.

Quite a few things to ponder, before pulling out the wallet. Consider also that coming models and updates will fix the teething problems.

The areas that might be improved by firmware or in future models are AF and operational speed. Getting IBIS (perhaps from Olympus), getting more native lenses ( a lot are coming!) and fixing that loud shutter that introduces vibration, unwanted attention and possibly shutter shock.

So what to do?  Because of its modular nature and very recent introduction the whole system deserves to wait and see how it evolves. 

A7, Flickr.

What I personally find very attractive is the Zeiss 35/2.8 and its splendid performance, at just EU 600.  So I might wait to see If the kit comes down in price and buy adapters for my Zeiss Jena 50, and Jupiter 85/2, and perhaps add an adapted UWA from Samyang. Far from expensive.

Start a new system? Too old for that. For operational speed and Street I'd keep my E-M5.

Other solution might be to wait for Photokina and see if and how Fuji and Olympus go FF.

Check also the review at DPreview. They gave the A7r and the A7 Gold and Silver award respectively, but they also spoke out the Cons.

So could  this be a Leica M substitute of a kind? There are some bugs in the design to fix. AF will certainly evolve for the better, like it did in the Fuji X-T1, the Olympus E-M1, and the Panny GX-7.

However, because of the lesser Mpx to process, smaller sensors like m4/3 will probably always be faster, and better with tele lenses because of the 1,5 or 2x crop factor, so your choice. IBIS with teles also gives a considerable advantage: it's like having an invisible steadycam.

For more deliberate tasks like Portrait and Landscape however the Sony A7 might well become the new Industry standard in mirrorless. It's the equivalent of what in film was called the Medium Format. A very portable Medium Format, indeed.