Redefining Domesticity: Francesca Woodman's "House" Series and the Politics of Feminism

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was an American photographer who produced the bulk of her work while she was a student at Rhode Island School of Design from 1975-1978. Her oeuvre is defined by the use of the nude female body (often herself) as a subject. Woodman’s use of her own body as the subject of her work has led scholars to analyze the photographs most often through the lends of self-portraiture. By contrast, this thesis offers a new reading of Woodman’s “House” series (1976) through the lens of craft culture, which is evoked by the architecture depicted in the series and the artist’s own approach to photography. In the “House” photographs, which are small black and white gelatin prints, Woodman is engaged with the architectural material and detritus scattered about. Her engagement within the surrounding prompts viewers to foreground and account for her setting. In this thesis, I argue that the “House” photographs represent the home as a site of creativity. In the midst of the feminist movement, activists and artists had understandably targeted the home as a site of female oppression. But Woodman, who was deeply vested in Victorian culture, saw it as a respite from the messy politics of the public sphere. By positing the home as a site of creativity she was able to assert photography’s status as such, too. While many photographers at this time used photography to document works in other media, Woodman saw it as a craft unto itself.