Francesca Woodman
For my final project in photography, I chose to represent mental health. I did this through a series of self-portraits that portray different struggles associated with mental health including depression, anxiety, and body image issues. Francesca Woodman, an american photographer for this project, inspired me. She was born in 1958 and died in 1981 at the young age of 22. She was most well-known for her black-and-white photography. Her photographs were usually of herself or other women and focused on long exposures and lots of movements to create blur effects. Woodman struggled with mental health her whole life and sadly died by suicide as well (Wikipedia).
The first image of hers I am choosing to talk about is this one. One thing I really like about this image is the lighting. I love how it looks like a spotlight is coming from above her. I had an image in my series where I used long exposure like in this image. I think it does a nice job of conveying the confusion that comes with mental health and how sometimes things in your life can get a little blurry when you are battling mental health. I also like the long exposure effect because a lot of times when people are dealing with depression or other mental illnesses, it can feel like your life is moving in slow motion or you are just “going through the motions” and the long exposure conveys that perfectly in my opinion.
The other image I am choosing to talk about is this one. Woodman has a lot of images that don’t flat-out make a statement but instead imply things, like this one. I like how she used the mirror with the brain (I think) and also the messy hair to show the state of the person. I struggled at first with this concept of having less obvious images and I just was taking statement photographs. But as I continued in my series, I began to take more suggestive images rather than images that just plainly state what was going on, and I found the suggestive ones to be much more moving and conveying for myself as well as my audience.
Overall I think Francsea Woodman is a really strong photographer. One aspect of her images that I also really appreciate is black and white. Although this was her only option at the time that she was a photographer, I think it worked for her. I think black and white photographs can sometimes convey a more moody vibe. I thought about turning some of my images black and white but ultimately decided against it because I knew my images needed to be able to convey my messages just on their own, without too many edits made to them in post-production. But anyway I think the black and white works for Woodman and I think she did a great job conveying her struggles with mental health.
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