In January 1981, a young American photographer called Francesca Woodman committed suicide by jumping off a building in lower Manhattan. Within five years of her death, Woodman was hailed as something virtually unheard of within the male-dominated world of photography: a female prodigy who had left behind an improbably mature body of work, consisting of more than 800 pictures.
 
Since then, her beguiling black-and-white photographs, frequently featuring her naked body, have been steadily assimilated into the canon of Western photography. Sometimes described as the last great Modernist photographer, working within a tradition begun by important Surrealists such as Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun, she is now universally recognised as a unique talent.

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