Abstract

This article considers the photographs of Francesca Woodman in terms of the complex and ambivalent set of relations they configure between photographer, photographed subject and viewer. Usually described as ‘self-portraits’, the subject of these fleeting, fractured images simultaneously presents itself whilst seeming to withdraw from them. The self, there where it most openly declares itself, disappears. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of exposition, or exposure, which posits the self as being in-exteriority, thinking the intimacy of subjectivity in terms of an originary relation to the outside or the other, I seek to problematize the possibility both of the portrait and the self that is its subject.