Where have you gone, Francesca Woodman?

There’s a narrow street in Providence, not far from the river, where the sun blends the buildings into one, its light winking along the warped and worn glass of ancient windows. The façades seem to push forward, leaning against your upward gaze, each of them holding the secrets of centuries past, clutching tight the whispers of all those who once occupied their halls.

For most, this place seemed like nothing more than a patchwork of tedium, stitched together by the seams of the everyday. A quiet place where entire lives could pass without a ripple. But here, along this street, in one of these forgotten buildings, there existed, for a brief morsel of time, a life of profound exception.

I have often ventured to this part of the city. For most of us, it's simply, "the East Side." It’s a cumbersome maze of one-way streets and steep hills clustered with blue-blooded colonial homes that seem to look down their noses at you as you trip along their tree-rooted sidewalk. It’s not a place I belong, but one that beckons constantly. There’s a feeling there. A melancholy. It’s a yearning for something or someone you missed, but never knew existed. If that's possible. It’s ethereal and ever present. It’s energizing yet solemn. It has called me my entire life and until recently I never understood where it came from.

This story begins in 1975, a full year before I was born. What is now a luxury condo was then a ramshackled, dusty-windowed mill building. Like so many of the buildings along that street, it no longer served its original purpose. Derelict and nearly dilapidated, it housed the apartment and studio of a seventeen-year-old RISD freshman, a young artist who would quietly shape the course of twentieth-century photography. Her work studied, exhibited, and revered across the world.

People far smarter than me have analyzed her work, described her style, and praised her vision in ways I’ll never match. It’s hard to say exactly what drew me in. Most of her photos are of herself. Some include fellow students, friends, muses, maybe just people passing through. I remember thinking they looked strangely familiar, almost recent, like something I might have scrolled past on Instagram. But they weren’t recent. They were taken half a century ago.

And in each one, the lives of those captured within, continued on. That’s fifty years of life and everything in between. Fifty years of birthdays have come and gone for them. Fifty years of laughter and of heartbreak. Fifty years of dreams realized and dreams abandoned. Fifty years of silence and noise. The shutter closed, the moment frozen, but their stories kept going. All but Francesca's. Unbeknownst to her and everyone else, the shadow she seemed to cast over her classmates already stretched far behind her. At seventeen, Francesca’s story was nearly over.

Her self-portraits stare back at me, stirring the same feeling I get when I walk the streets and sun-tipped alleyways on her side of the city. But the city she knew was not the city I know. She was here at a time when Providence was gritty and raw. The city was still two decades away from the so-called renaissance that would make it what it is today. Then, it was a place of deep urban decline, marked by rising crime, pollution, and the hollow shells of shuttered businesses and long-dead department stores.

But for students like Francesca, this only added to the allure. Her apartment studio had been carved from the bones of an abandoned factory. And her photographs, even apart from the setting, feel gritty and untamed. They feel forgotten. As if they too have been abandoned.

Maybe that’s what resonates with me. She gave form to the remnants of what was. And now, she has become part of it. Just as those forgotten spaces once offered her inspiration, she too, in the energy left behind, continues to inspire those who are willing to listen.

This part of Providence has always offered something I can’t quite name. I go there without intention, without agenda. I walk the sidewalks, pass the large brick homes, and listen. Not for words, but for a presence. For something that stirs in the stillness. I leave with the feeling that something has touched me. Not dramatically. Not loudly. But gently. Like the passing shadow cast by the days disappearing light. A reminder that even the briefest lives can echo across decades. That something once forgotten can still be found. That absence, too, has a shape. 

On January 19, 1981, while living in New York City, Francesca Woodman entered the Barbizon Hotel, made her way to the roof, and jumped. She was twenty-two.

Though she left no note, her final journal entry reads like a last attempt to explain why she was leaving, or perhaps, why she was here to begin with.

“I was (am?) not unique but special
This is why I was an artist
I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see and show them something different
Nothing to do with not being able to take it in the big city
Or with self doubt
Or because my heart is gone
And not to teach people a lesson
Simply the other side”

Simply the other side; perhaps her time had simply just run out.

Francesca would never know the reach her work would have. That her photographs would one day be seen as vital. That all these years later, strangers like me would still be searching for her.