According to Stuart Hall, identity is the ‘Enlightenment subject’ and occurred only in the 17th century when a person became a ‘fully centred, unified individual, endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action.’ (Hall, 1992, p.275) The technology and ideology development at the beginning of Enlightenment emancipated human and enabled people to become an individual asking the question “Who am I”. Among many definitions, Kevin Robins defined identity as follows:
“Identity is to do with the imagined sameness of a person or of a social group at all times and in all circumstances…Identity maybe regarded as a fiction, intended to put an orderly pattern and narrative on the actual complexity and multitudinous nature of both psychological and social works. The question of identity centres on the assertion of principles of unity, as opposed to pluralism and diversity, and of continuity as opposed to change and transformation”. (cited in Bennet, 2005, p.173)
To define identity would be difficult. It is a complex subject and it involves many different perspectives in addition to those Robins defined above. Due to the length of this essay, I would like to take a reductive approach by focusing on some of the philosophy theories, but inevitably also touching some psychology and sociology as there is no clean cut separation between these disciplines.
Identity in philosophy refers to identical self. Descartes doubted everything attempting to find certainty. He noted that things are not the way they appear to be and our senses often fool us. He began to question “I know that I exits; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know” (Descartes, 1641, p.158). He developed a mind-body dualism and claimed the self and identity is constructed thought. Descartes separated self from body and considered it static with no change over the time. It is one hundred years later, that, developing on the basis of Lock’s fledgling empirical methodology, Hume took Cartesian doubt further by questioning even Descartes’ sacred Cogito. He asserted that self and identity is something we constructed out of our illusion and memory from experience by causality. He argued that we are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions…in a perpetual flux and movement” (Hume, 1911, p.239). Hume posited that identity is constantly changing, though he did not deny there is an identical self.
Then Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) responded to Hume’s scepticism by developing the identity from subject-object relationships. He questioned if time and space really exist and proposed that these dimensions are products of our imagination from the very beginning. He argued
“The insights of geometry are not gained from experience but are verified in experience…the subject, recognises a reality that has previously been formed by it.” (cited in Cummins, 2011)
He enquired into our knowledge of objects and proposed that subject substantiates its position through object. The self would not exist unless there are objects, sensory data before the ‘self’.” Identity “operates in the dichotomy between the thinking subject and the thought object”. (cited in Cummins, 2011)
One hundred years later, Sigmund Freud analysed self and identity from a psychological point of view, he wrote:
“Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are feeling now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more expansive feeling – a feeling which embraces the universe and express and inseparable connection of the ego and the external world”. (cited in Posner, 1998, p.159)
The subject and object, identity and the external world, self and other are not fixed but an ever-shifting boundary. The process of forming the identity from these dynamic relationships is constant exchange between the inside and outside and through projection and introjections. The boundaries disintegrate and the demarcation between the subject and object become blurred and fused.
Based on the above theoretical framework, I would like to discuss some of Woodman’s works. Woodman’s subject was mainly exclusively herself. She liked to use slow shutter speed to create blurred self-portraits in natural light. A lot of works were made in dusty dilapidated interiors with minimal props. According to George Woodman, her father, all her work was created in a meticulously planned way (Townsend, 2006, p.9). I would like to focus on two Woodman’s typical images Space 2 and House 3. Both of the images were taken in 1976 at Providence, Rhode Island, when Woodman was an eighteen-year-old art student at Rhode Island Institute of Art.
Woodman uses photography as a medium to seek and explore her identity. In Space 2, she deliberately created her blurred presence by movement. Metaphorically I consider this as a symbol of her identity and the self. “I show you what you do not see – the body’s inner force,” she said, “You cannot see me from where I look at myself”. (cited in Sollers, 1996, p10) Her photography is a tool to operate an inward exploration of her identity. Is the blurred image, the insubstantiality of the subjects, in a way a kind of self-denial, self-lost and self-obliteration? Is it a visual interpretation of what Descartes mentioned:
“I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras. So what remains true? […] I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist?” (1639, cited in Hupl, 2011)
The camera, as a machine, mechanically caught the moment, the movement, and traces of the time elapse. What did Woodman find, as the photographer, when she finally saw the photo printed? Did she find the image exactly as visualised, or did she find the unfamiliarity of the image? What kind of relationship did she engage between the role as the subject and as the photographer via the machinery of the camera’s intentionality? What is the identity and self? Is it like what Hume mentioned:
“… nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.… There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.” (1911, p.239)
Woodman’s photography raised this question and left it open. Her work bears witness to the fledgling identity as a woman and an artist, which seems fluidic, transitory and elusive. This uncertain and changing state was embodied in her vulnerable blurry shadow in the image of Space 2 as well as many of her other images. Art critic George Baker commented:
“It is so hard to reduce Woodman’s work to a sincere recording of bodily or autobiographical experience, to a simplistic documentation of the self. If anything, she was documenting the limits of bodily experience, the impossibility of constituting the self”. (2010, p.65)
Woodman transgresses the embodied identity and unleashed a fluid bodied experience in her photography.
A lot of Woodman’s work used interior as the background. This visual background actually substantiates the subject. In House 3, there are mirror shards on the ground, peeled varnishes and holes on the wall, windows open, and bleached light through the windows. Below the windows we see the blurred youthful Woodman presence. She tried to use such a decayed and abandoned space and site to construct her identity by merging herself into the place covering torn wallpaper. Woodman is signified as the self, the subjects and the space is signified as the other, the objects. The self is thus created through the interplay of the subject and objects – the objectification of the other, as Kant claimed “there is no thinking without an object and therefore consciousness operates in the dichotomy between the thinking subject and the thought object”. (cited in Cummins, 2011) They create each other and sustain each other’s existence. The subject’s sense of belonging is created and the identity is substantiated by the objectification of the external world.
This physical space is actually her illusion of space, which is what Kant said the “insights of geometry” verified by experiences. The space, the object, plays “a vital role in the forging of personal identities” (Tschumi, 1994, p.77). Woodman’s blurred presence can be read as “some disordered interior geometries” which later she created an artist’s book with the same title. This reciprocal relationship becomes increasingly ambiguous, epitomised by her merging into the wall creating an overlapping and ambiguous borderline between the subject, the self and the identity and the object, the other and external world.
There is an unsettling disturbance of physical and psychological boundaries, a looming threatening of the absorption of her ego within this dark, ominous and abandoned setting, her fragile identity being engulfed by a desolated external world, a displacement of identity is looming in large. As elaborated by Margaret Sundell:
“The tension and strength of Woodman’s work lies in her ability to return again and again to this precise point of instability, to simultaneously create and explode the fragile membrane that protects her identity from being absorbed by its surroundings.” (Sundell, 2003, p.65-437)
Furthermore, this physical space can be read as a metaphor of the society. We all live in society and no one can be defined solely as an individual as we are all related to a specific community, be it gender, political, cultural, linguistic, religious or other. Therefore, society inevitably plays an important role in defining identity. The post Marxism and Foucault philosophy and Charles Taylor’s sociology cannot be omitted in this context. The individual identity is therefore no doubt social. Our body, as part of our identity, is also subject to social norms. Merleau-Ponty asserted that our consciousness is inherent in our body and the body is the primary locus of all our intentionality (1963, p.127). He proposed “carnal thought”, (Merleau-Ponty, 1963, p.188) which means we become aware of the world in a pre-reflective encounter. We require our body to be engaged in the world as if the world was our own body. He also explained the idea of reversibility, which raises the ambiguity between self and others, reality and imagination and subject and object. This is exactly what Woodman depicted in House 3 and many other similar works. Many art critiques, such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau in her work “Just Like a Woman” focus on the feminism aspect of identity in Woodman’s work. No doubt this is part of the complex identity issues.
Francesca Woodman constantly explored her inner self and external reality through continuous self-portraits. The lack of distinction between subject and object and the tendency to merge the self with the environment manifested in most of her works. She constantly expressed this unstable identity state through her works by the interplay between herself and the environment, while creating an inseparable complex. This complex relationship is the fundamental of her identity.
One thing interested, grabbed, and disturbed me for years is the window and the light shone through. Sitting below the window and leaning on a wall, she was only partially illuminated by the lights. We can only vaguely see some tree branches out of the window in bleached overexposed lights. Is this window the door to Woodman’s promising land? Is she struggling between merging into the surroundings in the shadow and escaping out of the window to this Acadia? Is her suicide six years later a successful way to escape the space and enter into this enigmatic world full of lights finding her true self and identity? Photography as a surface can only offer us elusive leads.
Baker, George, Ann Daly, Nancy Davenport, Laura Larson, Margaret Sundell. “Francesca Woodman Reconsidered: A Conversation with George Baker, Ann Daly, Nancy Davenport, Laura Larson, and Margaret Sundell”. Art Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Summer, 2003)
Bennet, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, Eds. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Blackwell Publishing, Boston, 2005
Cummins, Thomas, Portraits of Reflection, Internet Access on 19th of November 2011, http://thomascummins.com/masters-thesis/
Descartes, ‘Second Meditation’, p. 16, cited in Teemu Hupli’s Lecture Presentation, 12th of October, 2011
Hall, Stuart “The Questions of Cultural Identity” in Modernity & Its Futures, Ed. Stuart Hall, D. Held, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1911
Margaret Sundell, “Vanishing Points: the Photography of Francesca Woodman,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, Ed. Catherine de Zegher MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Structure of Behaviour, Trans. Alden L. Fisher, Beacon Press, Boston, 1963
McEvilley, Thomas Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity. Documentext Press, Kingston, New York, 1992
Posner, Helaine, “The Self and The World”, in, Mirror Images. Ed. Witney Chadwick, MIT Press, Boston, 1998
Sollers, Philippe, “The Sorceress” in Francisca Woodman Ed. Alexis Schwarzenbach, Trans. Rana Dasgupta, Scalo, Zuich, 1998
Soloman-Godeau, Abigail. “Just like a Woman” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1991.
Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. MIT Press, Boston, 1994
Townsend, Chris, Francesca Woodman, Phaidon, London, 2006
Woodman, Francesca. Space2. Providence, Rhode Island. Estate ID / File Name: P.028. 1976. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman
Woodman, Francesca. House #4. Providence, Rhode Island. Estate ID / File Name: P.021. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman
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