Is she daring us? To what? Her self-portraits from her intense, brief life burn with some secret hunger. Do her images contain clues for answers? How I wish she could speak or at least listen.
In contrast, she leaves us baffled by her short career, ended when she leaped to her death from an open window at age 22.
She can be seen as fascinated with death itself. A few images, such as those with her arms wrapped in bandages or holding a knife, may be from a suicide attempt that's mentioned in passing.
Her images are infused with a gothic premonition of death – the Romantic obsession with tragic, youthful demise, and lost opportunity. To speak of an eroticism of death is eerily heightened by knowing of her suicide to come – the images of her holding a knife or extending her bandaged forearms or climbing (sometimes naked) through Victorian gravestones become eerily chilling, leaving the viewer with a morbid fascination.
Her shots appear to surface from the birth of photography itself, an homage enhanced by black-and-white – often scratchy – prints.
And then there's the matter of her family – both of her parents and her brother were artists, each in a different medium.
Consider the sense of self-entombment in her photographic legacy.
As I delved into the images her family had released (there's criticism they're withholding much more), I pondered alternative directions my What's Left novel could have gone. These photos, to me, could have been by Cassia's father if he hadn't taken up the Tibetan Buddhism and then been granted the support he received from his wife's family.
In contrast, I encounter her after three of my novels followed a hippie-era photographer, and the newest tale picked up on his legacy nearly a half-century later. This time, it's told by his daughter, Cassia, who's trying to uncover his essence after he vanished in a Himalayan mountains avalanche when she's eleven. Her biggest evidence as an investigator stems from his cache of photographic negatives. The way we do with Woodman.
Cassia's research paradoxically forces her to reconstruct her mother's side of the family in depth and all of the reasons her father found refuge among its members.
His, I'll presume, are professionally competent and moving increasingly into color as the technology advances. Woodman's work turns inward; his ranges outward, through the changing times around him. His death comes unexpectedly, in a period of blissful encounters, among the monks and mountains who expand his vision.
So I return to the darkness of her vision and the imagined brightness of his. Both, in their own ways, tragic.
No comments:
Post a Comment