Francesca Woodman

I want my pictures to have a certain timeless, personal but allegorical quality like they do in say ingres [ sic ] history paintings, but I like the rough edge that photography gives a nude. —Francesca Woodman Over a career that spanned less than a decade, Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) created a body of work that has proven uniquely influential on contemporary photography. She explored self-revelation and theatricality, questioning her medium’s capacity to invest representation with narrative and allegorical elements. Frequently taking herself as a subject, Woodman also pictured other models, both female and male. She often worked serially, producing both individual prints and artist’s books. Woodman was drawn to the symbolic aspects of the female nude, the timeless and entropic qualities of dilapidated interiors, and natural settings. She regularly placed mirrors, vitrines, and other objects within her tableaux, positioning them in relation to figures to suggest metamorphosis and paradox. Born in Boulder, Colorado, to artists George and Betty Woodman, Woodman grew up in Colorado and near Florence, Italy, and attended high school in Massachusetts and Colorado. She made her first mature work, Self-portrait at 13 , in 1972, in which she obscures her face while foregrounding the camera’s cable release. Much of Woodman’s oeuvre dates from her years at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, which she attended from 1975 to 1978, spending time in 1977–78 in Rome through RISD’s honors program. While in Rome, Woodman had a solo exhibition in 1978 at Libreria Maldoror, a bookstore and gallery she frequented that championed avant-garde art and literature, and she was included in a group exhibition at Galleria Ugo Ferranti the same year.