Transitory Ghosts and Angels in the Photography of Francesca Woodman (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 2003 I was lucky enough to attend an exhibition of Francesca Woodman's photography from the late 1970s. I believe it was an occurrence of serendipity that I came to enter Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery and subsequently came to write about Woodman for my thesis. I ran into an old dear friend from Melbourne at the Edinburgh Spiegeltent one night and she described an exhibition so evocatively that I knew instantly it must have been Woodman's. She told me where the gallery was and I went the next day, where the experience of viewing Woodman's beautiful, agonised images would stay with me till now. This paper attests that Woodman uses her own body as subject/object to create a sense of fleeting (or serendipitous) femininity that passes between the polarities of presence/absence, woman/ environment, pain/hope and human/corpse, forming a feminist identity that is strategically 'in-between' and transient. **********