This season, Christie’s is offering a selection of rare, lifetime prints by Francesca Woodman. Her brief yet profound career centers around her time at the Rhode Island School of Design, including the year she spent abroad in Rome, and her time after college living in New York City. Woodman’s experimental, performative approach to portraiture – often portraying her subjects blurred, fragmented, or even merging with their surroundings – interrogates issues of identity, embodiment, and representation. Although largely unrecognized during her lifetime, Woodman’s photographs have exerted a profound posthumous influence for their introspective and psychologically charged exploration of the self.

Untitled (MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire) is a vintage self-portrait where the artist exists in a state of both presence and absence. Woodman’s ghostlike form ultimately challenges self-portraiture as a fixed or coherent identity, and underscores a broader inquiry into visibility, femininity, and artistic authorship.