Never-before-published work by an iconic woman artist from the very start of her career. Francesca Woodman took her first photograph at the age of the thirteen. From the time she was a teenager until her death at twenty-two, she produced a fascinating body of work exploring gender, representation, and sexuality by photographing her own body and those of her friends. Featuring approximately forty unique vintage prints, as well as notes, letters, postcards, and other ephemera related to the artist's burgeoning career, the volume, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at MCA Denver, details both Woodman's creative and personal coming-of-age during the years 1975-1979. Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation considers how the artist came into her creative voice and her singular approach to photography at a notably young age. Ranging from portraits in her studio/apartment in college to self-portraits in the bucolic Colorado landscape in which she was raised, these works capture Woodman's hallmark approach to art making: enigmatic, rigorous, and poignant. The volume also includes select photographs of Woodman taken by friend and RISD classmate George Lange during this period. Taken together, they present a nuanced and in-depth study of this formative period in the development of this groundbreaking artist.

On Being an Angel takes its title from a caption the artist inscribed on two of her photographs--self-portraits with her head thrust back and her chest thrust forward. Typical of Woodman's work in the way they cast the female body as simultaneously physical and immaterial, these photographs and the evocative title they share are apt choices to encapsulate the work of an artist whose legacy has been unavoidably colored by her tragic personal biography and her death, at age 22, by suicide. In less than a decade, Woodman produced a fascinating body of work--in black and white and in color--exploring gender, representation, sexuality and the body through the photographing of her own body and those of her friends. Since her death, Woodman's influence continues to grow: her work has been the subject of numerous in-depth studies and exhibitions in recent years, and her photographs have inspired artists all over the world. Published to accompany a travelling exhibition of Woodman's work, Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel offers a comprehensive overview of Woodman's oeuvre, organized chronologically, with texts by Anna Tellgren, Anna-Karin Palm and the artist's father, George Woodman. Francesca Woodman (1958-81) was born in Denver, Colorado, to an artistic family and began experimenting with photography as a teenager. In 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1979 she moved to New York to attempt to build a career in photography. Woodman's working career was intense but brief, cut short by her death in 1981.

Questo volume accompagna una mostra già presentata a Murcia, in Spagna - che propone una scelta di 114 scatti della grande fotografa statunitense Francesca Woodman (Denver, 1958 New York, 1981). Questo volume si configura come il più completo e recente riferimento editoriale per conoscere l'opera della fotografa. Vi sono riprodotte le opere in mostra quasi tutte di piccolo formato e fra le quali spiccano alcuni inediti accompagnate dai testi di Isabel Tejeda, Marco Pierini e Lorenzo Fusi, da apparati biografici e da una bibliografia completa sul lavoro dell'artista. Annotation Supplied by Informazioni Editoriali

The most comprehensive monograph on one of the most enigmatic photographers of the 20th century - now in paperback "Woodman's pioneering style and technique have made her one of America's most notable and well-respected photographers of the late 20th century." —Aesthetica The precocious and brilliant American artist Francesca Woodman, is one of post-war photography's most original figures. This important book includes a major review of her life's work based on research by art historian Chris Townsend, together with extracts and facsimile pages from Francesca's personal journals edited and curated by her father, George Woodman. This unique and much-admired book is now available for the first time in paperback.

An essay revealing the intimate side of one of the 20th Century’s greatest photographers, died young in 1981 at22 years

In her feminist inquiry into aesthetics and the sublime, Claire Raymond reinterprets the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Placing Woodman in a lineage of women artists beginning with nineteenth-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, Raymond compels a reconsideration of Woodman's achievement in light of the gender dynamics of the sublime. Raymond argues that Woodman's photographs of decrepit architecture allegorically depict the dissolution of the frame, a dissolution Derrida links to theories of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Woodman's self-portraits, Raymond contends, test the parameters of the gaze, a reading that departs from the many analyses of Woodman's work that emphasize her dramatic biography. Woodman is here revealed as a conceptually sophisticated artist whose deployment of allegory and allusion engages a broader debate about Enlightenment aesthetics, and the sublime.

"This monograph on Francesca Woodman (1958--1981), the most comprehensive to date, charts new approaches to her oeuvre. Whereas the evanescence of the female figure in the artist's photographs has often been read as an aesthetic anticipation of her suicide, the essays by publishers Gabriele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen as well as those from Johannes Binotto, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Beate Söntgen illustrate Woodman's passionate self-staging in the tradition of the tableau vivant. Her poetic and metaphorical use of props (mirrors, gloves, rugs etc.) and her staging in a room, where the laws of geometry seem to no longer apply, are examined in the essays. The 80 photographs in the SAMMLUNG VERBUND collection can be seen for the first time in their original size."--Publisher infomation.