Crossing the invisible

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and Vivian Maier (1926-2009) are two photographers American women who have produced a wealth of self-portraits. Rightly or wrongly reason, their two names are now inseparable from personal fates that have become modern myths of disappearance ╨ the first because of his suicide at the age of twenty-two, the second because of the amount of dandruff not developed left behind in almost total anonymity. On the fringes of the artistic movements that were contemporary with them and from which they remained distant, they also seem to have invented images on the margins of time. That they did so in the 20th century is not insignificant. They inherited a double story that this work formulates and explores. On the one hand, there is the unprecedented upheaval in the status of women in the previous century, which continue to experience a contradiction: that of finally being able to be the authors of their own image while belonging to a female lineage very old models. On the other hand, there is the obsession born in the 19th century for memory, archiving, conservation, safeguarding, which gave rise to the invention of archaeology and museums as well as that of psychoanalysis. Today, this fixed idea is transformed into the fear of the possible extinction of our species in the near future. At the crossroads of all These phenomena are the advent of photography, and more particularly self-portrait photography practiced by women. Summoning little girls, mothers, nightlights, lovers, young brides, enigmatic strangers, ghosts or even the poet Emily Dickinson, the book explores how female figures, at first among which those of Francesca Woodman and Vivian Maier, help us to to go through trials of separation and death in a spirit of creative joy immortal. The work wants to say how they help us in this century where we no longer seem allowed to hope.