Art

This comprehensive monograph on the short career of American photographic artist Francesca Woodman (she committed suicide in 1981 at the age of only 22) includes more than 200 of her black-and-white images.

Woodman is probably best known for her blurry young women merging ghost-like into the furniture and wallpaper of dilapidated rooms, so it’s easy to focus on the theme of disappearance. But the extensive text by Chris Townsend places her work in a broader context of gothic art, Surrealism, feminist theory, fashion and of the body in relation to time and space.

She began her career in an era when the wider acknowledgement of photography as an artform was fairly new and the convention was for a more documentary style. Seeing a fuller representation of her work reveals her influence on how not only fine-art photography, but fashion shoots, would develop.