The photo work of Francesca Woodman was invisible to me until I came across this book. Inside I discovered a stunning volume of work. What touches me most is the respect that Woodman gives to her subjects (primarily is focused on the female body and the space in which the gaze of the photographer and the female nude perform in). I found the work to be equally fragile, playful and powerful. I'm still surprised that I missed out on Woodman's work all these years, oh well, the same thing happened to me with Diane Arbus.


More on the artist from Victoria Miro:

1958 born Denver, Colorado, died 1981.

Francesca Woodman produced a remarkable body of work before her untimely death in 1981 aged only 23. Her romantic, surreal, and often disturbing black and white photographs reference the history of modernist photography as well as presciently gesture towards more recent art about objectification and the female gaze. Her work is groundbreaking due to her unconventional methods of imaging the female body. By radically placing her own body at the fore of her photographs as a means of inquiry and self-expression, Woodman is firmly situated alongside her contemporaries of the late 1970's such as Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke. Her work also presaged artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Nan Goldin and Karen Finley in their subsequent dialogues with the self and reinterpretations of the female body.