A Disappearing Act: Francesca Woodman's Portrait of a Reputation

This essay discusses an unpublished series of self-representational photographs made by Francesca Woodman in the late 1970s which she collected together to form an artist's book. Given the title Portrait of a Reputation, over the series of five photographs Woodman performs a photographic striptease, creating a narrative of disappearance as the artist gradually slips from view. Finally leaving only a trace of her presence as an indexical hand-print on her studio wall, Woodman's series can be read as an analogy of photography itself, as the artist uses her own body to act out stages of the medium's process. Looking at the way in which the serial format and the album structure work to animate this process in the imaginary moment of spectatorial encounter, I argue that Woodman's retroactive performance hinges on her use of the prop of the glove which both conceals and reveals her body. A prop which recurs throughout Woodman's photographic practice, the glove is here imagined as a narrative prop or lure, drawing attention away from the photographic sleight of hand the artist performs, as the subject under the camera's objectifying gaze is ultimately absented. [author's abstract]