Francesca Woodman

In the thirty years since her death, Francesca Woodman's work has retained an undeniable immediacy and continues to inspire a cult-like following of admirers. Woodman began photographing at the age of thirteen. By the time she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975, she was already an accomplished photographer with a remarkably mature and focused approach to her work. At the age of twenty-two, she committed suicide. Woodman might be merely a tragic footnote in the history of photography were it not for the startlingly compelling, complex and artistically resolved body of work she produced during her short career. Her oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular exploration of the human body in space and of the genre of self-portraiture in particular. Her practice assimilated and advanced aspects of feminist theory, Conceptualist practice, and performance art. Thus, a close re-examination of the maturation and reception of Woodman's artistic vision presents an important and timely opportunity to reassess the heady artistic moment during which she came of age. This catalogue, produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the first major American exhibition of the artists work in more than two decades, promises to be a landmark reconsideration of Woodman for the twenty-first century. It will paint a fuller picture of her oeuvre than has previously been available, spanning her earliest student experiments to her late, large-scale blueprint studies of caryatid-like figures for the massive "Temple Project", and her experiments with fashion photography. The exhibition will bring to light many photographs that have never before been exhibited or published, and the book will focus on these and other vintage prints that the Woodman estate is making available for this exhibition and publication. These rare prints will allow audiences to appreciate Woodmans skill as a printer, and to grasp the importance of the final print to her artistic vision. Through all of these means, Francesca Woodman will examine why her photographs continue to be so profoundly affective many decades after their making.