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.

The present lot features a charming inscription from Woodman dedicated to the subject of the photograph, Daniel Wolf, on the verso. In her inscription, Woodman describes finding this “little anthropomorphic foray” while cleaning out some files in July 1980, just a year before her tragic death by suicide. The gradation along the corners of the print gives the image a further sense of character and grit, making it a unique yet classic representation of Woodman’s haunting and alluring oeuvre.