Forever enchanted by Francesca Woodman’s photographic realms, I trace her contorted, fluttering body in the passing shadows and opaque reflections of her self-portraits–I see a witch, a siren, a spirit, a saint, a veiled apparition. Woodman’s body is simultaneously exposed and elusive, trapped and transcendent, absent and present, contorting and concealing her image to disorient our external gaze and point to the limitations of the body and phenomenology. Her glitching flesh makes me suddenly, and anxiously aware of my own twitching body, and the claustrophobic fact that I cannot escape the skin I live in. This embodied experience is echoed in the words of theorist and art historian Amelia Jones: she states, “the photograph is like the skin that envelopes our corporeality in that it indicates or presupposes interiority but also opens to sociality. The photographic portrait is only apparently skin-deep: its implications are more profound, the intersubjective engagements it puts in motion vibrating with the moist, pulsating organicism of the body’s innermost core, leading itself to the cognitive and emotive ‘depths’ of the subject.”

It’s worth noting that the photographs included in the exhibition at Danzinger Gallery are especially intimate as they were initially gifted by Woodman to her close friend, collaborator, and classmate George Lange while they were in graduate school. Subtle puncture marks, rips, and folds can be found in many of the photographs in Lange’s collection, offering another fleeting physical trace of the artist made by the performative body.

Danziger Gallery
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave B1
Los Angeles, CA 90404
On view through February 4. 2023