Francesca Woodman
Until June 13; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

A cold, white gravestone stands, tilting slightly, against a backdrop of grass and trees. At its arched top lurks an empty cavity where a portrait photograph might once have been fixed. Nearer the ground, there is a larger, square hole: the ghostly blur of a naked young woman crawls through it.

This is the first picture in Ingleby Gallery’s new show, a survey of the work of American artist Francesca Woodman. She was somewhere between the age of 14 and 17 when she took the photograph in Boulder, Colorado, and at the age of 22, she threw herself from a loft window to her death.

That makes Ingleby’s choice of introduction to the show all the more poignant. The young Woodman seems to crawl back to us from the grave, still vulnerable, but totally assured. Her head, as in many of her photographs, is the most obscured part of all – just a faint whisper of swirling hair, vanishing into the haze of a long exposure.

It’s tempting to read all of Woodman’s work in the light of her later suicide: her photographs are certainly packed with the raw intensity of youth, and tinged with a pain which everybody will recognise from those teenage days when you don’t quite know who you are, or how you fit.

Even in her most conventional poses, the artist assumes a state of not quite being there; half-obscured by the blur of time, or by her encroaching, peeling, crumbling surroundings. It’s difficult not to see Woodman’s tragic demise prefigured in the ghostly apparitions she makes of herself.

But despite her spectral appearance in the graveyard photograph, Woodman is palpably alive. Her flesh is soft against the stone, the camera failing to pin her down as she moves. The precise, static gravestone, like the photograph which would once have been embedded in it, is dead; a marker completely incapable of conveying the lost life it represents.

For all its gothic beauty, Woodman was commenting in this picture on the inadequacy of photography; its inability to convey a moment in time, or the essence of a person. The thousands of photographs she took of herself were not self-portraits; they were knowing demonstrations of the limits of self-portraiture.

Having spent much of her youth in Italy, Woodman was equally at home amongst the intellectual circles of Rome as with her fellow-students in Rhode Island. In 1979, she moved to New York where she tried and failed to find work in fashion photography. It was there that, suffering from depression and a break-up with her boyfriend, she took her life.

Quickly forgotten during the 1980s, when brash reputations and a fascination with popular culture were de rigueur, Woodman has only gradually been rediscovered. Now she is loved by audiences, artists and critics alike, and figures ever more frequently in group shows.The artist left over 10,000 negatives behind her, now cared for by her parents, both artists themselves. The estate comprises just over 800 prints, but of these, only around 120 have ever been made public.

A small collection of vintage Woodman prints is currently on show as part of Artist Rooms at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It’s an idiosynchratic selection, once owned by Woodman’s boyfriend. By contrast, Ingleby Gallery can boast the first general survey show of the artist’s work in Scotland, having had the luxury of choosing their 27 favourite photographs directly from Woodman’s estate.

The small photographs sit well in the gallery’s main space, nestled between the high windows which run the length of the room. While the windows find echoes in Woodman’s photographs, Ingleby’s pristine walls have nothing in common with the dilapidated interiors which feature so often in the artist’s work.

Woodman stands between two windows, in one such classic photograph, against a cracking plaster wall. She is naked; only her feet and midriff visible behind a mask of peeling floral wallpaper. She is disappearing into the history of the room, part of its fabric, her soft skin only a temporary wrapping. But, like a Marilyn Monroe of the art world, Woodman will always remain young, beautiful, and at the height of her powers.

Catrìona Black, The Herald 13.04.09