PHOTOGRAPHER LEAVES A LEGACY OF STARK IMAGES

Photographer Francesca Woodman wasn’t famous when she killed herself six years ago at age 22.

Although she had gained a circle of admirers and her work had been shown in several exhibitions, Woodman’s uncatalogued collection of more than 500 photographs seemed destined for obscurity. But thanks to Ann Gabhart, then-director of the Wellesley College Museum in Wellesley, Mass., Woodman instead has left a photographic legacy.

Beginning in 1983, two years after Woodman’s death, Gabhart led a crusade on behalf of Woodman’s work that culminated in a solo exhibition, which opened in February, 1986, at Hunter College Art Gallery in New York City. After stops at Wellesley College and the University of Colorado, “Francesca Woodman: Photographic Works” opened Thursday at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery. The show closes May 2.

Gabhart first saw Woodman’s work by chance when she attended a social gathering in the Boulder, Colo., home of the artist’s parents and noticed several small photographs hanging on a wall.

Intrigued, she asked about them. Woodman’s parents, artists themselves, showed Gabhart more of their daughter’s work: about 500 prints in all, many of them class assignments from the photographer’s days at the Rhode Island School of Design. Gabhart was convinced that she had discovered the work of an important artist.

“I was really just overwhelmed by it,” Gabhart recalled in a phone interview this week. In the work, much of it produced during Woodman’s teen-age years, Gabhart saw a mature and powerful exploration of femininity, sexuality and personal identity.

Rosalind Krauss, an art professor at Hunter College, shared Gabhart’s enthusiasm for the work, and the two women organized the Hunter exhibition. They contacted critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau, who greeted Woodman’s work with equal enthusiasm and then wrote the central essay in the exhibition catalogue.

“Nothing is rarer in photography than the prodigy,” Solomon-Godeau wrote in an article published last year in Vogue magazine. “Equally unusual, given the attention brought to the medium over the past 15 years, is the discovery of a large, important and unknown body of work.” The Woodman exhibit, she continued, “is a cultural event and a dramatic attack on prevailing assumptions about artistic maturity.”

When the show opened at Hunter, Woodman’s work gained further praise. In a New York Times review, critic Michael Bresson called Woodman “an exceptionally gifted American photographer,” and wrote that the exhibit was “a human, social and artistic document of very high interest.”

That Woodman’s work has found an audience has gratified her parents. “There’s the sense of the show as somehow an affirmation of our daughter’s talent and career,” her father, George Woodman, said in a telephone interview from Boulder. “The fact that it does give enjoyment and interest to a great many people is very satisfying.”

Francesca was born in 1958 in Denver. Her early years were divided between Boulder and Florence, Italy, where her family often stayed. Her father said she took an early interest in art, but added that he didn’t find it unusual--”Both her parents were artists and all the adults she ever saw were artists.” George Woodman is a painter, and his wife, Betty, is a ceramist. A son, Charlie, became a video artist and is now working in Philadelphia.

Francesca’s early interest in art foreshadowed her talent, but it was with her discovery of photography at age 15 that the extent of her talent became apparent. Her interest in the medium was “very complete and very sustained and very resourceful,” her father said.

“Photography is an art where the real achievement is not in some physical process. The real achievement is in some kind of intuition of an image,” he added. “I think what we’re talking about with Francesca was really a kind of personality to which poetic intuition came very, very readily. It just clicked when she connected with the camera.”

The young photographer explored her craft as a boarding school student in Andover, Mass., and continued when she entered the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1979 after taking a year off to live in Rome. After graduation she moved to New York City, where she worked to establish a career and participated in several group exhibitions before committing suicide Jan. 19, 1981.

Woodman usually arranged her photographs in series. A photograph from one such series, called “Space 2,” shows a nude figure in a glass museum display case. Another series, “House,” shows Woodman--a physical beauty with long brown hair who often used herself as a subject--being consumed by various items in a dilapidated room: peeling wallpaper, a door, a fireplace.

The black-and-white images, taken in a variety of settings, are moody and often disturbing. Solomon-Godeau wrote about them as “elegant and brutal, seductive and savage, lapidarian and violent” and remarked on how, in her belief, their artistic exploration of feminine roles in society anticipated debates and practices currently shaping feminist theory.

“One of the things I really found incredible is her honesty,” said Gabhart, who left Wellesley last year to study ceramics at Alfred University in New York. One reason she organized the exhibition is because she believed university students would recognize Woodman’s struggle and find resonance in her images.

“I think that young people immediately recognize it and understand it,” Gabhart said. Wellesley students found the show “very affecting,” she said. “The reaction was one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen to a university show.”

During her research, Gabhart talked to a number of people who knew Woodman. The picture that emerged was of a strong and intense personality--”There was a sort of awe of her,” Gabhart said--and of a “very committed formal artist.”

“For a young person, she had an extremely vivid sense of style--in her clothes, her behavior, the way she arranged the physical spaces that she lived in,” said her father. “She had a very, very high sense of romance, and I think that her style of living as a young person in her late teens was emphatically Bohemian.”

She was quite popular among her peers, he recalled. “Francesca as a child at school always had a coterie of kids who admired her greatly, and she always had a lot of friends and had a very complicated, continuous and high-tension series of social interactions with other people.”

Her father believes that a failed relationship contributed to her decision to take her own life. “The precipitating factor was a relationship with a young man which had essentially gone wrong, and there was a great deal of misunderstanding about it, and she found it very, very difficult to adjust to,” he said. “It simply wore her down. It was not something she could adjust to, and she ended up taking her life.”

Gabhart fears that Woodman’s suicide may taint reaction to her photographs. “I think the whole suicide question can blur the viewing of her work.” Viewers, she said, can be tempted to “read the future into the past” by scrutinizing her photographs for clues to the decision to end her life.

“I think, in the end, it was something that can’t be explained,” Gabhart said.