Bertrand Schefer

‘History is not in the image, but in our relationship with the image, in what it deposits in us,’ writes Bertrand Schefer, who first saw some of Francesca Woodman's photographs in the late 1990s and was thunderstruck by them. Those photographs, so repelling to him at first, return over the years to question him, to torment him, incessant as drops, persistent as a love obsession. He vows to write about her one day, to shed light on the enigma she embodies, to save her from oblivion. It is not her photograph he wants to talk about, it is she he wants to bring back to life, if only for a few moments.Like an insatiable archaeologist, he then re-exhumes everything that can help him reconstruct that 'missing story'; a story in which the flow of his own personal memories, triggered by the blurred and unattainable figure of Francesca, is mixed with the young photographer's biographical story: her childhood in Colorado, her strong ties with Italy, her parents, who were also artists, her first camera, her formative years at art school, her stay in Rome that brought such a singular temperament to maturity. Francesca stands out from the crowd, atypical wherever she goes. In her faded period clothes, she portrays herself from time to time as a phantasmal presence, ineffable, sensual, anachronistic, already aware that the contemporary world is not the scenario in which she will find her own dimension. If her art is the engine that moves her, it is also the poison that consumes her, the prison from which one day in 1981 she will succeed in freeing herself by opening the window of her ramshackle flat, at the age of just twenty-three, leaving behind an immense body of work.