Francesca Woodman

She practically used only her own body in her photographs, showing it only as a ghostly, evanescent presence that was often in motion. With the evocations left on the pictures, she suggested the fleeting and ephemeral, the transient and fragile. Her compositions fragmented and isolated. They bore witness to the immediacy of representation. With a desire to disappear, Francesca Woodman blended into her surroundings, becoming one with them, playing with lacerations and suggesting the peaceful violence of a dismembered body. Despite her early demise in 1981 at the age of 22, Francesca Woodman left behind her an impressive corpus of visual works.

The artist's works are included in international museum collections such as those of the Tate Modern in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The first travelling exhibition of her work took place in 1986, and her main European exhibitions were in the 1990s. In 1998, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles and the Fondation Cartier were the first to present a retrospective of her works in France. The Fondation's exhibition toured Europe, helping to introduce her works to a wider audience and establish her reputation as an influential photographer.