Born to a family of artists, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was a prodigious American photographer best known for her cinematic black-and-white pictures featuring herself and other female models in mysterious and unsettling scenarios. After making her first mature photograph at the age of 13, she built a critically acclaimed body of images before tragically taking her own life, aged 22. Much of Woodman’s work, which explores issues of gender, the self, and representations of the human body, was produced while studying at Rhode Island School of Design (1975-1978). Influenced by Surrealist and Gothic sensibilities, many of her photographs show women, naked or clothed, in derelict interior spaces, their bodies typically obscured by furniture or made blurry by long exposure times. This small photograph – one of the few printed during the artist’s lifetime – shows a barefoot woman sitting pensively in a chair, seemingly unaware of the mysterious bodily apparition floating in the doorway behind her.