FRANCESCA WOODMAN: WATER SPECIFIED

Abstract

Paul de Man makes a distinction between interpretation and reading as that which finds meaning in a text versus an analysis of the relationship between a text’s rhetorical and grammatical dimensions, respectively. Interpretation, as he defines it, assumes that a text’s meaning is largely transparent and that there is no disharmony between how it means and what it means. Reading, on the other hand, makes no such assumptions: it shows how a text’s meaning cannot be reduced to grammar and seeks out moments of indeterminacy between its literal and figurative meanings. I propose a “reading” of Francesca Woodman’s photographs that demonstrates how the critical, largely feminist, literature on the artist engages in interpretation and thus fails to appreciate the artist’s exploration of photography’s conditions of representation. In the process, I argue that her photographs function like hypograms, a concept of de Man by way of Saussure, or infra-texts. In short, Woodman’s photographs are readings of photography and womanhood and her art defies conventional understandings of artistic identity and agency.