Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

25T56 Francesca Woodman at Vienna Albertina

By on

E55, V03.

I arrived at the city in time, as a featured art exhibition was scheduled to end in less than a week. The first time I’d seen their work was in a gallery on Geary St. in San Francisco in 2011. The impact of having seen their images has long stayed with me. Almost 14 years later, I’m in Vienna’s Albertina for their 1st ever presentation of Francesca Woodman with over 100 of her photographs from the Verbund Collection.

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was an American-Italian artist who created an essential body of photographic work: expanding poetic ideas into the visual with the play of natural light and the use of external props (as if a stage-play); examining human beings’ relationships to the spaces we occupy; and asking questions about we view each other, particularly women. Her images provide a kind of electric charge, a sense of momentum and drive, and an overall energy that transitions frequently between the static and dynamic.

I’m a little sad she didn’t have a long life: what ideas, work, wisdom, and message could have come over the intervening years. I’m happy I found her work all those years ago, more so now that I’ve had some time to learn what she was trying to communicate and portray during those 9 special years of her life.

Albertina: on display on the 2nd floor. The Francesca Woodman exhibition ends Sunday, July 6.
“From Polka Dots or Polka Dots”, from the Polka Dots series, 1976.
“House #3”, from the Abandoned House series, ca. 1975-1976.
Untitled, 1975-1976.
Untitled, 1976.
“Almost A Square”, ca. 1977.
“Corner with Lily”, 1978.
Untitled, 1978.
Untitled, 1979.
Untitled, 1979. What’s special about this pair of images: “The artist holds the skeleton of a large leaf in front of her naked back. The stalk and veins of the leaf allude to her spine and ribs, respectively, with a formal correspondence to the structure in the wall, which has been exposed by the peeling plaster layer. There’s a reference to the shape of the leaf as well as her dress’ fern-print pattern. The props are unrelated, but the artist has created a chain of references among leaf, wall, dress pattern, and her body.”

I received neither support nor compensation for this content. I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 2 July 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

One Response to “25T56 Francesca Woodman at Vienna Albertina”

Please leave your comments below

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.