Woodman was inspired by the cultural awareness of woman as an object. Her self-representation claimed back her ownership and authority over her own body.
“Woman functioned at best as an idealized ‘other’, at worst as an object for the projection of unresolved anxieties: male subjects sought transformation through a female representational object” Eva Russ
Photographing one’s own body was really about more than re-claiming. It was about transcending it, getting outside the limitation of the body and into the subconscious. Frequently she would photograph her body without her face. This was about de-materialising the body. The face was closely linked to identity but the objectification of women clearly gave no individual identity to women.
Woodman uses mirrors frequently. The mirror is a sought of ‘icon of self’. It serves as an interesting duality of self. The observer and observed, image and representation. It also serves to imply women’s dual consciousness – the self as culturally defined and the self as different from cultural description. It also hints at Freud’s theory of narcissism and the ego. Culturally it is also said that a woman is a mirror for a man.
Mirrors also hold a mystical connection to an ‘other world’. A place of the human soul. Roland Barthes connects photography to death through objectification. Humans are whittled down to a preserved image. Woodman also photographs her body as seemingly dead. In her ‘Angel’ series she photographs herself, as an apparition so there is an interesting connection between objectification, preservation and death. Freud also see’s the double as insurance against the destruction to the ego, the denial of the power of death.
Woodman also touches on the themes of entrapment, being ‘on display’.
Eva Russ sums up Woodmans work as follows….
“What happens when woman finds herself in the empty space between gaze and her objectified image?
Woman would multiply her image and in the midst of so many illusionary ghosts of herself, she would conceal the true self, who makes them move.”
