Francesca Woodman

Over the course of her brief career, Francesca Woodman produced haunting photographs that featured the feminine form in space. In her beguiling portraits—including many self-portraits—she captured her subjects blurred in motion or partially hidden behind furniture. Woodman’s compositions, aided by her long exposures, offer ghostly meditations on sexuality, identity, and the construction of the self. Woodman studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she developed her practice as she took inspiration from Surrealist photographers such as Man Ray and Claude Cahun. She did not exhibit widely before her untimely death at age 22, but her work has since been shown in New York, Zürich, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London, and has been included in institutional shows at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Vertical Gallery of the Verbund Collection, the Guggenheim Museum, and Tate Modern, among others. With her simultaneously confessional and obscuring approach to her subjects, Woodman paved the way for photographers such as Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman.