Some Disordered Interior Geometries by Francesca Woodman

WOODMAN, Francesca. Some Disordered Interior Geometries – Publisher’s Proof Copy. Philadelphia, Synapse Press, 1981.

Publisher’s proof copy of the only artist book by Francesca Woodman to be published during her lifetime: a unique copy inscribed by her publisher, the American artist Suzanne Reese Horvitz.

Woodman picked up the little exercise book on geometry Esercizi graduati di geometria at Maldoror, a surrealist bookshop in Rome, and used it as a notebook from 1976 onwards, including her photographs and handwritten text. The anastatic copy of the notebook became Some Disordered Interior Geometries, her sole artist book to see publication during her lifetime. Published by the Synapse Press in 1981, just days before Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22, many of the original 500 copies were allegedly distributed at her funeral, a time when she was still virtually unknown.

Some Disordered Interior Geometries was, perhaps, Woodman’s answer to André Breton’s Nadja (1928), one of the most iconic works of the French surrealist movement. In 1979, Woodman wrote ‘I would like words to be to my photographs what the photographs are to the text in Breton’s Nadja. He picks out all the allusions and enigmatic details of some rather ordinary unmysterious snapshots and elaborates them into a story. I’d like my photographs to condense experience’.

This publisher’s proof copy once belonged to artist Suzanne Reese Horvitz, a co-founder of the Synapse Press in 1980.

Quarto, pp. [24]; partly uncut, very good in pale pink wrappers (some light foxing, pages slightly cockled, a short closed tear to top edge of first leaf); pencil ownership inscription ‘This is my publisher’s proof copy Suzanne Reese Horvitz’ to p. 1; custom grey box.