“I hadn’t seen that done before, and I think it just expanded what I felt was possible in photography,” she said.
Zoo has contributed an essay to “23 Devotions for Francesca Woodman,” a forthcoming book on the photographer from Saint Lucy Books. In a recent interview, Mark Alice Durant, an artist and writer who founded the small art press, explained that this project, scheduled for publication in 2027, was not reverential or nostalgic, but was rooted, instead, in respect for the artist’s lineage.
“I think that she, in her short life, did some extraordinary things,” Durant said, “explored some really beautiful, terrifying, moving, important, you know, sacred spaces.”
That there are still works to discover from a career that spanned less than a decade speaks to Woodman’s prolific output. It also highlights the foresight with which her parents shepherded her work after she died.
Given that Woodman died at just 22, and that she frequently photographed herself and explored, with startling intensity, early womanhood, sexuality, representation and erasure, her work has often been read through the lens of her untimely death, a profound and private familial tragedy. The actions her mother, the ceramist Betty Woodman, and father, George, who was also an artist, nonetheless took underscore how keenly they understood the enormous import and power of the work in its own right and the need to protect her legacy.
In the interview, McClure said the pair started the family foundation in 1994.
“Unbeknownst to many people, they set aside much of Francesca’s work, her lifetime prints,” McClure said. “So the best prints of everything, they set aside; if there was only one print of something, it was set aside.”