READING ROOM: In 1999, The Ohio Review—a long-running literary journal published by the English Department at Ohio University—included a portfolio of thirteen photographs and an accompanying essay by George Woodman, appearing among pages of poetry, prose and fiction.

“To photograph a photograph is to quote it, and just as quotation marks transform an utterance into a text, a photo of a photo shifts our attention away from the subject of the picture toward the picture as an object among other objects. I would also hope that it places the subject of the picture in ‘another' world more appropriate to contemplation,” he wrote.

Since the mid-1980s, Woodman had shifted from painting to primarily creating black and white photography with still life and models. His photographs within photographs—“all tones of grey”—evolved from and recall his paintings from the early 1980s, which layered patterns upon other patterns, figures and elements of architecture.

“…I like the look of photographs as things…I enjoy the extension of one pictorial space into another, the murmuring dialogue pictures undertake with each other, the way light can flood from one picture into another, and the ambiguities of scale, time, and material.”

Click on this link to view George Woodman's essay and photographs in The Ohio Review.

READING ROOM highlights past essays, reviews, and interviews about Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, and George Woodman that provide new insights and lenses through which to read and understand their work.

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