Francesca Woodman, a photographer unknown before her death by suicide at age 22, became unusually influential for her approach to camera work as fictional art. An exhibition currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents over 100 vintage prints, along with rarely seen artist books and video that cast a broader perspective on an artist whose creativity has often been overshadowed by her personal narrative.

Many of the images on view were done during her student days at Rhode Island School of Design. Woodman would take a simple assignment to make a self-portrait, and then go on to create a highly structured scenario in which her ghost-like figure hovered amid the crumbling interiors of an abandoned house.

Woodman worked almost exclusively with black-and-white film, shooting in low light to create dream-like images of her often nude figure floating in space or emerging from the peeling wallpaper of her decrepit settings. As a student she was constantly experimenting within an extremely narrow range of possibilities: herself as the model; a decaying house as the set; a familiar camera, film, and darkroom practices. She reinterpreted ideas from Surrealist cinema to create a form of set-up photography that was just becoming part of the postmodern language.

At the time, identity and gender politics were relatively new strategies in art. Although her work remained hidden from view during her lifetime, Woodman’s self-obsessive, cameleon-like approach prefigured the current use of photography in all its forms as a medium for self-discovery.

Francesca Woodman is on view through February 20, 2012 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It will then open at the Guggenheim Museum New York on March 16^th.

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