Photography’s Shooting Star

Exhibitions in London and New York honor the prodigious photographer who left behind a timeless body of work following her death, at just 22

Gagosian in New York City is celebrating its newly announced representation of the Woodman Family Foundation with the show “Francesca Woodman,” and in London, where the National Portrait Gallery features her work in a joint exhibition with the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, “Portraits to Dream In,” opening on March 21.

Francesca Woodman on a visit to Rome in the late 70s.

Woodman was born into a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado. Her father, George, taught at the University of Boulder, and her mother, Betty, was a celebrated ceramist. It was within this intensely creative milieu that the precocious child with prodigious talent was hothoused into artistic understanding way beyond her years. At 13, her father gave her one of his cameras to take to boarding school, where she began taking photographs in earnest and quickly mastered the medium, shooting and, crucially, developing her work.

Woodman created the majority of her work at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, where she studied between 1975 and 1978.

More here.