Photographer Francesca Woodman's legend grows

American photographer Francesca Woodman's captivating body of work not only endures but has grown more potent in the 30 years since she committed suicide at 22. Ambitious, determined and brilliant, provocative by nature and in practice, Woodman was impatient for the recognition and commercial success she felt she deserved but came too late for her to enjoy. We, however, have a chance to view her striking, unconventional self-portraiture - her naked body was both canvas and battleground for her creative psyche - and bear witness to a young talent that seemed to spring full-blown when she was 16 or 17, already on fire about photography, and a visionary teeming with ideas.

Woodman's life may have been brief, but that she burned brightly is amply evident in Francesca Woodman, the first comprehensive career retrospective of her work in 20 years. Now on display at SFMOMA, the exhibition features 160 vintage, predominantly black-and-white photographs, some inscribed with lyrical, minimalist text handwritten by Woodman, her ventures into fashion photography as well as large-scale, blueprint studies or diazotypes in which she shot her nude torso draped with flowing fabric in a nod to classical Greek statuary. With her long, dark blond hair, beautifully proportioned body, and deep-set eyes, she had the fine features one might find etched on a cameo.

What's astonishing is that these visceral, surreal-inflected images were produced during a mere five years while she was still developing as an artist and finding her way as a sexual woman - she did better at the former than the latter. The show is necessarily compressed and concentrated, made up of photographs lifted from a short period of student experimentation, before she matured artistically and her talent came to fruition - and what talent. What an artist. Yes, she's exploring the body's relationship to space, referencing architecture and the nude, but there's something enigmatic and deeper in play.

Emotionally, she felt separate, a person apart, and the photos of herself naked or partially clothed attest to an assertion of her existence over and over. Her nipples are pinched by metal clips, she stuffs herself partway into cabinets housing specimens and taxidermy animals, curls up beside a bucket of eels, hangs by her arms from the top of a doorway, emerges from under sheets of torn wallpaper covering her body, lays across a loveseat in undone lingerie with her back to us, sits on a sunny sidewalk like some abandoned street urchin as the head of a long-stem flower peers its head tentatively around the corner, or gazes into the mirror. In a ravishing image that speaks of sensuality and surrender, she lays on the carpet, her head turned away, wearing a flowered dress. In the last known picture she took of herself, she looks straight at the lens, her upper body bare, her hair tied back, a black scarf wrapped around her neck and her birth certificate tacked to the wall.

The show is divided chronologically among her investigations while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she was miles ahead of fellow students and faculty; Rome, where she spent her junior year (she was fluent in Italian, and her parents had a country house outside Florence); and her final time in Providence. Many pictures were shot amidst ruined interiors: in an abandoned house with peeling wallpaper in Providence, and in an empty spaghetti factory in Italy. Woodman also experimented with moving images, and the exhibition includes rare short videos. In one clip, she stands behind a tissue-paper curtain and slowly tears it apart, revealing her naked body as if stripping layers away from a vulnerable soul; in another, she lays down in flour that has been spread on the floor, leaving behind her silhouette on the ground when she stands up, like a cartoon character shedding its shadow.

She was the progeny of successful artists married to each other for 60 years - her mother is ceramicist Betty Woodman; and her father, painter George Woodman, gave Francesca her first camera. At home, where art was central rather than peripheral, she learned a work ethic close to religious devotion according to C. Scott Willis' The Woodmans, a new documentary that may be the best film ever made about the perils and rewards of being a working artist. Her parents, who were and are competitive with her, and whose reputations have been eclipsed by Francesca's accomplishments, reflect on their exceptional daughter, their own lives and her unfathomable suicide.

Excerpts from Francesca's yearning, observant, increasingly despondent journals, included in the film, piece together a portrait of someone so intensely alive, attuned to nuance and disappointment that she could hardly bear her feelings, let alone function in daily life. All she could do was work. "I was inventing a language people could see," she writes, though that invention came at a price. One friend says that it's as if she wore her skin inside out; fragility and self-exposure were the psychic risks - and cost - of being an artist.

With her prodigious gifts, drive and tragic biography, Francesca's mythology, like that of Sylvia Plath, has been appropriated by feminists for their own purposes. But the art speaks eloquently for itself. Myth isn't necessary to appreciate the work - for that you need only your eyes.

Francesca Woodman at SFMOMA through Feb. 2012. www.sfmomaorg. The Woodmans at the Roxie Theater, Nov. 18-24. www.roxie.com.