Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime

In her feminist inquiry into aesthetics and the sublime Claire Raymond reinterprets the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Placing Woodman in a lineage of women artists beginning with nineteenth-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina Viscountess Hawarden Raymond compels a reconsideration of Woodman's achievement in light of the gender dynamics of the sublime. Raymond argues that Woodman's photographs of decrepit architecture allegorically depict the dissolution of the frame a dissolution Derrida links to theories of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Woodman's self-portraits Raymond contends test the parameters of the gaze a reading that departs from the many analyses of Woodman's work that emphasize her dramatic biography. Woodman is here revealed as a conceptually sophisticated artist whose deployment of allegory and allusion engages a broader debate about Enlightenment aesthetics and the sublime.