A Memory of Francesca

I met Francesca Woodman unexpectedly one day when she turned up at my apartment in Gramercy Park in 1979. It was perhaps at the suggestion of someone long since forgotten….

I have printed this book to share my photographs of Francesca with the many dedicated followers who were touched by and engaged with the private vision and enduring beauty of Francesca and her work, who honor and admired Francesca with such feeling as I have held in my memory, this young artist who it would appear was sadly left out, with so much promise in hand, yet somehow so many of the doors she tried were shut. She was never to have the life she wished to be in. She was was 22 years old when she ended that life.

AMW

February 12, 2021

Under the Influence

As a photographer I am almost honor-bound to fight against words, words that try to explain or otherwise reduce the meaning of an image to the illustration of a thought...
But I must also confess to liking words, not to define an image, but to companionably enhance it with added depth. It is possible for the words and the photographs to benefit from the presence of the other—to alter perceptions we previously did not notice, or were unaware existed.
I was born in Dublin on September 1, 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the year W.B. Yeats died. Growing up, I was more interested in action than reading. At ten years of age I did not know Yeats, apart from the mindless drudgery of having to memorize The Lake Isle of Innisfree without the faintest idea what it was about except living alone in the country. The poet’s name probably struck dread into many another child too, not knowing what a “bee-loud glade” or “noon a purple glow” could be. It left a residue of resistance to his poetry....
I would photograph the kinds of landscapes, animals, objects, places and people that inhabit Yeats’s poetry. To accompany the images, Artelia and Henry in a combined effort would compose a text drawn from newspaper articles, historical documents, and other writings about events and occurrences which reflected the humor, melodrama, and talk of the Irish. Since Yeats wrote about places and people, heroes, myths, ghosts, and spirits, his work provided a wide range of possibilities....
No text was ever composed; relationships fractured, friendships failed and fell away. With those passions now quieted, a selection of my work from that fervent time is placed alongside fragments of Yeats’s beautiful poems to evoke the Ireland I felt and saw and want to keep in mind. As he wrote, when all is said and done, we are “still the indomitable Irishry.”
— AMW

New York Subways 1977

Photographs by Alen MacWeeney

In 1977, photographer Alen MacWeeney captured a melancholy, painterly series of images of people on New York’s subways. Born in Dublin, MacWeeney began his photographic career in Paris as an assistant to Richard Avedon. After moving to New York, he became captivated by the challenge of making images of people sitting and standing in the bright confines of subway cars. He drew particular inspiration from the works of Reginald Marsh, a social realist painter who was known for his depictions of crowded life in the city. But it was not until he began sorting through work prints that the project took on its unique voice. As the prints lay strewn about, partially on top of one another, MacWeeney found that the combined images told more than a single picture alone. Diptychs became the key to his subway photos. He created pairings that at first glance may appear to be a single image. The subtle groupings generate feelings of surprise, humor, imbalance and menace.
– Alex Q. Arbuckle