Taking Flight from the Self:

An Introduction to The Collected Writings on Aporia Francesco

The work of the critic is often relegated to criticism in the most literal sense—which is to say negativity—and it is a rare treat to engage in true praise. It reminds one why one set out to be a critic in the first place: for the love and admiration one feels for great art. But great art and great artists, especially, come few and far between, and the altogether new is an even more elusive creature. It is for that reason I think so often of the mist-laden San Francisco evening of December 4, 1992, when I found myself brought, quite by chance it seems to me now, to the threshold of a small, nearly unknown gallery on the ground floor of an old Craftsman-style building in North Beach [fig. 1]. This was the earliest incarnation of Summer Maitland’s gallery (now located South of Market). The young curator had just completed the master’s program at the San Francisco Art Institute, and it was during her time there, she told me, that she had met the artist whose work was on display. Maitland was determined to exhibit only women back then and felt strongly that she begin with someone unknown as a demonstration of good faith. Indeed, I had never heard of Aporia Francesco (or A., as I had the familiar pleasure of calling her) before that night, but when Maitland asked if I might review the exhibition for my column in ArtWest, I agreed to do so as a favor. In those days I was feeling worn out from twenty years spent gazing upon the same mediocrity that littered gallery walls everywhere, struggling to find anything within the frame to stimulate my writing. And so, it was with a begrudging sense of duty and nothing more that I arrived at the Maitland Gallery that night.

I recall, clearly, standing before the first of the prints in the show and feeling the panic of discovery in my chest. Had the gallery been the kind of place to pour anything other than box wine in paper cups, I imagine the murmur in the room hush as a martini glass or champagne flute slips from my paralyzed fingers and shatters dazzlingly on the cement floor. In reality, it is likely I only fumbled with the waxy cup clutched in my suddenly perspiring hand in order to loosen my ascot, as my breath caught in my throat. It had been so long since I had seen anything that moved me to write as I did in the early days of my career, and seeing these photographs, that feeling flooded back.

A.’s particular relationship to the roles occupied by artist and model was something she negotiated from the very start: All of the prints in that first show were self-portraits in the nude. She had cleverly titled the series Ingénue, suggesting both her own sense of herself at center stage, as well as a break with the artist and model on display (who were, of course, one and the same woman). The title was a recognition of the work as the product of an innocence she now stood apart from, a flight from an earlier self. In the first set of photographs [fig.2], the artist stands before the camera, her hair let down from what I came to know as its usual loose pile on top of her head, obscuring her face like theatre curtains. She holds a smooth sheet of glass—perhaps five by seven inches, the visual echo a photographic plate—against various parts of her body, flattening her stomach in one photo, her breasts in another. There is a sense of play to these pictures, of exploration and discovery, but also of a great awareness of existing inside a photograph: the glass creates a frame within the border of the print, a picture within the picture.

Then there were the more ominous props, far less playful—the rope and the clips and the blade. Three distinct images, each, upon first glance, referential of the smudgy prints one glimpses between the covers of an S & M magazine. But A.’s photos are not necessarily erotic in their intention but rather exist simply as an index of the model’s pain threshold, as another mode of self-discovery. In all three of these pictures, the torso is closely cropped between the knees and neck, showing us a Romanesque bust, pale as marble. In the first print in this triptych [fig.3], A.’s legs have been bound, the rope biting into her flesh, which bubbles between the lashes like the legs of the cartoon Michelin Man. The second photo [fig.4] is taken from the same vantage, a close-cropped view of the artist’s body from the thighs up to the neck, her skin puckered by a littering of clothespins. In the final—and perhaps most striking—photo [fig.5], A. has donned a sheer nightgown with a lace collar, open down to her navel so that a single breast is revealed and beneath it a long, trickling cut. The offending blade (a letter opener, by the look of it) dangles from slender fingers against the dark fabric.

In my review of the show, published in ArtWest, I wrote:

Here we have a young person discovering herself, and doing so through the camera, so that her self and her art might never be conceived of separately. This is a synthesis many artists wish for but never manage to achieve. This young artist, a recent graduate of the master’s program at the San Francisco Art Institute, has managed to do just that, creating a body of work that is so closely linked to her own body that the line between art and artist blurs beautifully.¹

What I failed to see at the time was that, through this type of process of conscious becoming, A. defined herself to the point of entrapment. It was precisely because she and her art were so synonymous that her very existence depended upon its recognition. It is this very self-awareness that can catalyze both elevation and downfall, as we have seen with many a young genius throughout history.

Between 1990 and 1995, Aporia Francesco produced a body of work as brilliant as it was revealing, comprised of several hundred evocative and provocative self-portraits, more striking than any we have seen in the photographic world since, perhaps, Cindy Sherman’s “film stills.” Indeed, some critics have dismissed Aporia as a less rigorous imitator of Sherman, but it is a failing of their own limited reference that has inhibited them from seeing how the former has surpassed the latter. Considering A.’s oeuvre holistically, as we now have the sad privilege of being able to do, it is clearly the work of a young master, mapping her journey from girl to woman—nineteen at her artistic conception, twenty-four at her time of death. And it is exactly Francesco’s mastery that outstrips those of us who have remained behind to examine her work; to toil in the wake of her creative genius. And though we are perhaps unable to fully grasp a talent of such magnitude, I am in good company in this endeavor: it is an honor to introduce this collection of essays alongside some of the finest critics, artists, and thinkers I have the pleasure of knowing. And what better reason for our congregation on the page than to remember a friend so dear to all of us as Aporia Francesco? If it were not for A., I would not know many of those whose words are printed in this monograph. As she brought us together in life, she has proven to bring us together, yet again, in death.

When A.’s posthumous dealer, Irving Yee, came to me last spring with the idea to assemble this compilation of documents tracing the late artist’s career, I was humbled by his insistence that I pen the introduction. A. was already a year gone by then, and she had yet to be memorialized properly. I am certain that this collection of essays will make a perfect companion piece to any of the books of her photography already in print (and the many that are forthcoming) for both the scholar and the casual observer alike. Though full canonical recognition is doubtlessly on the horizon for A.—and we have already seen her wider appreciation begin—she remains a somewhat enigmatic figure when it comes to her personal life. It is a shame that we—and here I mean to implicate all of us in the local network of galleries and critical forums, but also, in a more abstract sense, the art world at large—did not turn our attention on her sooner, and it is almost an embarrassment that we should only come to praise her once it is too late to elevate her sense of self-worth. Still, it is recognition well-deserved.

It was only after my rave review had been published that Maitland corrected an error in my writing: she and Aporia had not been in graduate school together at the Art Institute. In actuality, A. had only just completed her bachelor’s, the two meeting when Maitland curated a show of undergraduate work on campus for her own thesis in curatorial studies. (Maitland details this meeting in her own submission for this volume.) It was then, upon learning of A.’s young age and relative inexperience (even younger and more inexperienced than I had originally conceived), that I knew I had discovered a master: that rare breed of master, too, who has both natural aesthetic instincts and the tireless work ethic necessary for the refinement of their craft. I was barely given the opportunity to shake A.’s hand at the opening: she had a dismissive, preening aura, clearly well aware of the genius she contained and the majesty it afforded her. This was my first glimpse of Aporia Francesco’s sense of grandeur, which, I must admit, I do not believe was overinflated in the slightest. It is simply rare that we have the capacity to recognize greatness in ourselves, and we are, as a public, unaccustomed to one who does. I wanted to see her work again right away, and more of it, but, more potently, I had to see the young artist again. I told Maitland to pass along my praise, and a few days later Aporia called me at home. She had called to thank me for the kind words, she said, though I got the sense that she found my praise nothing short of obligatory; the phone call, too, perfunctory. But this call ended with an invitation to visit her at her home studio, the first of many such afternoons we spent together, and so I felt that my recognition of her had gained me some audience in her limited court.

A. lived alone in a small apartment in Russian Hill, seven flights up in a building already perched near the peak, so that to be in her little home was to feel suspended in the sky. (Don’t you love the view? she asked me when I first set foot in the room. It feels just like falling.) She buzzed me in when I arrived, and came to the door of her apartment in the nude. She was eating caviar from a can, delicately scooping and nibbling the pearls with a demitasse spoon.

I was just in the middle of something, she said, beckoning me in. It was apparent she had been photographing: a large-format camera and two towering lights were set up in the center of the room facing an empty wall. Here, the term studio apartment took on a literal meaning: her apartment was her studio, and it was more studio than living space, the line between art and life blurring so that it was difficult to tell if a division existed at all. Most notable in this regard was the lack of furniture. There was a small kitchen in one corner of the open room, outfitted with a wooden table and chairs. When she opened the refrigerator for a box of cream for our coffees, I noticed far more film than food was stored inside. She had jimmied a twin-sized mattress into the walk-in closet, where she slept beneath her hung-up dresses and sweaters. The rest of the apartment was empty, save for scattered photographic equipment and props for her various shoots. Her body, too, occupied the space, perhaps the single object that treaded between the domestic and the artistic spaces most obliquely.

And so this woman—barely more than a girl—lived like a monk in these ascetic conditions, waking early, working ‘til late at night, she told me, sometimes not leaving the apartment (and therefore the studio) for days on end. She leaned out the window to smoke. When she did go out, she often went no further than the Art Institute, a scant five blocks away, where she still made use of the darkroom to process and print her photographs, where she sat for hours in the campus library poring over books of photography and criticism. How A.’s lover, the painter William Stendhal, fit into this life, I do not know. (He never had any interest in me and has requested privacy in the matter ever since A.’s death.)

When, upon first sight of how she lived, I asked her what she did for work, she said, I take pictures, Mr. Gershkowitz, you know this. (Even though she always called me that, Mr. Gershkowitz, I often felt, when I was with her, that our ages had been reversed: that she was fifty-five and I twenty-two.) Of course, I knew she took pictures and could see she was devoted to it. But I could also see that she was not selling many of her pictures, and, if she had begun to sell a few, perhaps thanks to my favorable review, they were not yet going for more than a few hundred dollars each. It was something of an open secret, I later learned, that A. came from a wealthy family on the East Coast. She had grown up in Connecticut, vacationed in Europe, and spent her high school years at Phillips Exeter Academy, before fleeing these fantastic circumstances for her art life in California. The family disapproved, it was rumored, but there was little they could do other than send money and hope she came back to the fold when this phase, as I imagine they termed it, blew over.

A. told me none of this herself, but it all seemed to be common knowledge in our shared social circle and came to me in fragmentary whispers in the months following our meeting. She was very reserved when it came to her family, to any semblance of a life outside of the one she had made for herself, even if it was on their dime. I have no interest in disparaging this. I find it admirable for one so out of place in the world they were born into, as A. was, to cast off that caste so forcefully, as A. did, to strike out on her own. I wonder only now at the possible damages that such a cleaving might have caused her. But it was this conviction in herself as an artist that made her so brilliant and the failure of the public to recognize it that makes them so dull. But she persisted. At least for a little while.

After this meeting with A., I brought Irving Yee to see the pictures at the Maitland Gallery. Perhaps I was too aggressive in my assertion of their brilliance, and Irving refused, initially, to offer A. his representation. With the exception of her final exhibition, it is only since her death that he has fully committed to the role. He liked the work, he said, but he would be hard-pressed to find a market for it. I will let Yee speak for himself in the essay he has chosen to include here, but simply put, Aporia was unsellable until she was dead, when her work became a finite commodity. And so the exhibition at the Maitland Gallery came down, and A. was not an overnight success.

About six months after this, I saw A.’s work again, this time on display at an iteration of Art Market [fig.6], the brainchild of the now esteemed international curator Max Myers. The conceit of the curatorial project, for those who are not lucky enough to have witnessed it first-hand, was a series of weeklong pop-up exhibitions at various corner-stores and bodega grocers throughout the Bay Area, hence the clever pun in the title Art Market.

Myers modeled this concept from an exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (formerly the Boston Institute) in the late 1950s, Young Talent in New England. This exhibition, as promised by the title (and at the risk of glaring regionalism), displayed the work of new and promising artists from around the immediate New England area. While the work in the show was selected and arranged by the ICA, it was not held on their premises but instead at the local Stop & Shop grocery store. An announcement for Young Talent in New England, appearing in the March 9, 1959, edition of the Boston Globe, stated with an air sympathetic to its reader (and the potential art collector):

Much as we should like to, we cannot always go to art galleries, while on the other hand, we always stop to shop. That is why we [and here the we shifts, almost imperceptibly] have brought these paintings for display at Stop & Shop.

The advertisement appeals to the everyman, rather than the lofty collector, in a sweeping and perhaps valiant—though most likely commercial—effort to democratize what had surely come to be seen as the elitist world of the fine arts. Now, the advertisement seems to say, the average grocery goer has access to the arts: art has been conveniently fit into their busy schedule for them. The ICA, of course, had its own agenda and slyly positioned paintings in the produce aisle, drawing an unconscious comparison between the longevity of a piece of fruit and the perishability of something so fleeting as the contemporary in art. The subliminal messaging was clear: Get it before it’s gone!

But when Max Myers took inspiration from this 1959 exhibition, his aims were truly more democratic than demagogic. He wanted to see art in places where it did not exist and make it visible to those who did not have time to visit the downtown galleries. Where the ICA’s Young Talent in New England had focused on expanding its commercial market, Myers wanted only to exhibit work for view, priced modestly, in the event that someone happened to be interested in making a purchase. When I learned that he would be featuring Aporia in an upcoming edition of Art Market, I was thrilled.

Here was an exhilarating new collection of photographs, striking in their unique quality, but also because of the thematic similarity to A.’s final body of work. In these pictures, A.’s figure is a blur, in motion against the background of the drab wall of her dilapidated apartment [fig.7]. A. twirls and swan-dives through the long-exposures, pausing every once in a while so that the slightly more defined contours of her body have been exposed on the film in places. She appears to be dancing through a black wire frame, which floats, as if by magic, in the center of the room. At first it seems that the frame has been drawn with a marker on top of the print, but then I realize that it has been scratched directly onto the negative so that it appears in the print as a spectral contour suspended in the middle of the room. Again, as in the earlier work, this form creates a repetition, a picture within a picture, emphasizing A.’s entrapment within the frame.

Again, I brought Irving Yee to see these pictures. Again, he declined to represent Aporia. Let me make one thing very clear: I do not hold Yee responsible for anything. I merely find it shameful that, oftentimes, it seems an artist must die in order to be valued, as though a life of dedication to their work were not sacrificial enough. It is for this reason (and you will forgive me saying so) if I am at all reticent towards Aporia’s sudden stardom in the years following her death. Of course, I am grateful to see her genius finally recognized, as Yee and I have worked hard to make it so, but it continues to upset me that this recognition must come in response to the death rather than the work itself. But perhaps this is a position informed only by my grief, by my personal anguish and confusion in response to losing her.

I feel that here I must, perhaps to the chagrin of some, highlight the particular strangeness of that loss. For it is a loss in the truest sense of the word: a sudden and inexplicable vanishing. While it is true that A. led a fairly secluded life, there had been no sign of her receding further than usual in the months leading up to her death and so it felt all the more sudden. While I know that some hold forth the hope that Aporia might still be alive elsewhere, it is, in the mind of this critic, a safe assumption that she is dead and gone. There are certain statements, veiled and overt, in her letters (many of which are included in the appendix of this volume), especially the correspondences with her mother, that make me confident in this assumption.

Aporia was disappointed in the lack of enthusiasm the public showed for her work. She shared this with me more than once in the few years I knew her, in the rare, yet all too raw, instances of emotional openness. Usually, these confessions were followed by tears. She was angry, she said, that she had not been taken more seriously during her studies, and that this treatment of her as juvenile had followed in her career. Aporia did not say so directly, but I know she must have suspected sexism, in addition to the ageism she suffered outright, as the reason for what she called her failures. I agreed with her that it was frustrating to see such a great talent go unnoticed, and I continued to champion her work with a supportive review for every exhibition she took part in. In the five short years of her career, this saw some minor results: invitations to show at slightly more and more prominent galleries (one as far as Los Angeles), a few lectures, and some semblance of local fame,² culminating in her final exhibition, the long-overdue solo show at Yee Contemporary, Inescapable Self.

While this last exhibition should have launched A. into the kind of fame she and I thought only appropriate, the show was met with a mostly dismissive critical reception, a strain of which I have touched on earlier in regards to comparisons drawn between Francesco and Sherman. But nothing short of immediate canonical recognition would satisfy Aporia, and when she was not received in this way, she took her leave of us, resulting, intentionally or not, in precisely the recognition she had been refused.

In large part, I blame myself. I believe I failed A. in my role as a critic in two ways: I failed to alert the public to her brilliance and I insisted upon it too much. I cannot help but wonder if it was my insistence that bound her sense of self so entirely to her work, that trapped her inside it and made it impossible for her to take the dismissal of her work as anything other than a personal affront. Haunted by this prospective guilt, I took it upon myself to investigate the circumstances of her death in the only way I know how to examine anything: visually.

Allow me now to share the resulting ruminations regarding Inescapable Self. None of what follows appeared in my original review, in large part because that piece of writing predated her untimely death—and, yes, again, I say death, not disappearance, as some others might insist upon. Forgive my certainty of this factor, but also bear with my speculations, for the two are related directly.

It was in my close examination of Looking for a Way Out [fig. 8], the centerpiece of Inescapable Self, that I began to read into it a direct message. The grid of Polaroid prints, each taken from the same exact position, like the successive frames of a film, shows the window of a drab room that I do not recognize as A.’s apartment. The window is not her bay window, but a large, multi-paned window (three by four, to be exact, echoing the composition of the larger piece). The outside is impossible to discern (the panes glow with white light), and one has the feeling—and perhaps it is precisely because of the heaven-like glow outside the windows—that the room is quite high up, floating in the sky. Against the background of this wall of light, a silhouette moves throughout the composition. It is clearly the figure of a nude woman (Aporia herself, I am sure), but the lighting makes the discernment of identifying features impossible.

In the first photograph in the grid (top left), the woman is seen pressed up to the wall beside the window, arms splayed across the sheetrock as though she is attempting to flatten herself against it.

In the second and third photographs, she tries to slide open the window itself.

Next, she is on her knees, her fingers dug in at the bottom of the baseboard, as though she is attempting to lift the wall off the floor.

In the fifth picture, she kneels in profile to examine the bottom left corner of the room. It is in this image that the viewer is struck by the subject’s need to escape; struck by the gravity of her confinement.

The sixth photo imitates the first, the body pressed against the window itself, now an air of panic in the raised shoulders, the wide stance.

In the seventh picture, the woman hangs by her arms from the top of the windowsill, her legs pressed against the lower panes in an attempt to shove her way out of the room.

She continues to hang by her arms in the next photo, now apparently defeated, legs limp, the fight gone out of her. This moment holds all of the themes of the piece in it: exhaustion; defeat; persistence; even the clever way in which the body is framed by the window: a picture within a picture.

In the ninth picture, the silhouette kneels before the window, perhaps in prayer, or resolution.

Following this, we see her redouble her efforts, this time pushing against the glass with her hands, her feet spread wide and farther back, her upper body lunging into motion. One cannot help looking at this photograph and feeling a twinge of panic at the imagined shattering which would send the body through the window in a bloody mess.

The penultimate photograph shows the portal open at last, the silhouette leaning against the window frame in a pantomime of exhaustion. The window has opened outward in two large panes, hinged along the side. Viewing this image, we wonder briefly how this woman was unable to recognize the mechanism to open the window successfully to begin with, but then we see clearly that that question is at the very heart of the piece: the inescapability of circumstances even when they present an easy exit.

The final photograph shows Aporia straddling the windowsill, her arms locked against the window frame in anticipation of a leap.

And here, at last, I come to my conjecture: the piece is a suicide note. All in one, it is an explanation of the circumstances preceding the suicide and the reasoning behind it, though I will stop short of suggesting that A. literally leapt from a high window. Instead, I merely wish to suggest that the images in the photo grid operate as a metaphor for her interiority, detailing the innermost turmoil of an artist who feels trapped inside their work, or the demands, perhaps, their work makes of them, and an opposing wish to be free. The desired freedom, A. argues in the piece, can only be found in death, hence the final image presupposing a lethal plunge.

This image is a haunting one. Aporia’s intention (as I believe it was intentional, and here I understand there is some dispute) in presenting this as her final work feels potent and not to be overlooked, especially compounded by the fact that her disappearance followed so quickly after. And here, I do imply suicide outright.

In all my years as an art critic, I never imagined myself a detective, but there you have it. Though, really, I have conducted all my detective work (and I hesitate to even call it that) from the vantage of visual analysis. I have been forthright about these assumptions from the start, so there is nothing that I have written in my theorizing here that should come as a shock to the reader. And let me impress upon the reader further that I have no grounds outside of the visual for my argument, I know no secret truth of A.’s death or whereabouts. My thesis is, in this way, a purely scholarly one, aided only slightly, perhaps, by a few dissonant sentiments that A. shared privately with me on a few occasions during her all-too-short life, but it seems distasteful to transcribe them here.

But we are blessed, even in her absence, with one thing. We have Aporia’s photographs. And a word here, in the closure of my hypothesis regarding A.’s death, about photography.

This is a medium that, unlike many others, allows us to gaze directly through the artist’s eyes, placing us almost fully within their particular subjectivity. It is also a medium in which a single moment is snatched from the stream of time, preserved ad infinitum, the fleeting converted to the infinite. It is therefore a strange thing to find oneself the subject of a photograph, and worth every bit of our attention when an artist, such as Aporia Francesco, turns the camera upon herself for the entirety of her artistic career, fully conflating the positions of subjectivity and objectivity.

Roland Barthes once wrote, of sitting to have one’s picture taken, this (and here I have taken the liberty of changing the pronouns so that his description might be mapped onto Aporia’s work directly):

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one [she] makes use of to exhibit [her] art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity … the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels [she] is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death … I am truly becoming a specter.³

In Aporia’s case, she herself occupied all of the roles in Barthes’s four-way field of forces (“the one I think I am … etc.”), at once the reaper and the specter. It was in this capacity that she was long dead before her physical disappearance, perhaps even before I knew her. But this entrapment carries a hopeful note, as well as the macabre one I have just elucidated: it means that Aporia is still with us, perhaps as fully as she ever was.

Even if her disappearance were a kind of vanishing act from which she could return—and yes, I have heard the arguments, many of which will be extrapolated in the following pages: she was moneyed and ran in circles outside the art world we were not privy to, knew people who would have facilitated her slip—I believe it is foolish to think that granting her long-deserved fame would incentivize her return. I should hope that the motivation for recognizing Aporia’s mastery would not be to bring her back in the flesh, but rather as a way of keeping her here with us, in whatever shadowy capacity we can.

Charles Gershkowitz, critic-at-large

San Francisco, 1997

1 Gershkowitz, Charles. “Aporia Francesco’s Ingénue at Maitland Gallery.” ArtWest, vol. 9, no. 4, Jan. 1993, pp. 44-49.

2 This period has been accounted for in exhibition catalogs and essays, many of which have been reprinted here, so forgive me if I pass over it lightly to get to my point.

3 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Noonday Press, 1988. pp. 13-14.