She is best known for her black-and-white self-portraits. Taking photographs of herself makes her unique to other portrait photographers, it also makes her images personal. She also took images of other female models which were often nude and blurred, where figures merge with their surroundings and faces are obscured.

Despite her short career, which ended with her suicide at the age of 22, Woodman produced over 800 prints during her life. The majority of the prints produced by Woodman are untitled, and her works are known only by their date and location. Moving to New York in 1979 to pursue a career in photography, proved to be difficult for Woodman. A negative response to her photography and a failed relationship pushed her into a deep depression, causing her to take her own life on January 19, 1981 in New York. Though she had few opportunities to show work during her life, Woodman has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel,” which opened in 2016 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Influenced by Conceptualism and featuring recurring symbolic motifs such as birds, mirrors, and skulls, Woodman’s work is often compared to Surrealists such as Hans Bellmer and Man Ray. Woodman’s work is also characterised by her use of long shutter speed and double exposure, the blurred image creating a sense of movement and urgency.

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“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner …?”

It was interesting to learn about Francesca Woodman as I do not normally research this style of work. I find it fascinating that she took a lot of self portraits as this is very different from other portrait photographers. I find her work quite haunting and dark, the poses of the models are always unnatural and the locations of the images are spooky and give a sense of neglect.