Becoming the archivist at the Woodman Family Foundation sometimes feels oddly inevitable to me. I was introduced to Francesca Woodman’s images as a photography major at RISD twenty years after her time there and remember being both besotted with and intimidated by her work. “This is student work?” I don’t think I was alone in that sentiment among students. My fellow classmates and I often found ourselves in two categories: a menagerie of ideas without the skills to execute them, or technically proficient without a meaningful vision. Woodman’s photographs seemed a mastery of both. Inevitably, her influence would unconsciously wind its way through our impressionable minds as we searched for our own footing.

Woodman’s ability to discover and harness the environment in Providence is especially striking to me. I recognize (however accurately) the life of a RISD student in the images she made there—a disused display case, dusty crown molding in an old building, taxidermied animals in RISD's Nature Lab, repurposed art supplies, the kismet of unexpected opportunity (in her case, an overturned train car filled with flour), and of course enlisting friends and her own body amid a full class schedule. If she was constrained by physical reality and the limitations of student life, I can’t see it in her images. I see an artist who was able to compose in her own visual language using anything around her, as though the Providence in her work had been wholly created from her mind.

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