On Being an Angel

Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel is a monograph on the American photographer Francesca Woodman. Its title comes from a caption she inscribed on two self-portraits in which her head is thrown back and her chest thrust forward.

Organized chronologically, the book surveys Woodman's work in black and white and color. She made most of it by photographing her own body and those of friends, exploring gender, representation, sexuality, and the body. Koenig Books published the volume to accompany a 2015-2017 travelling exhibition shown at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Foam in Amsterdam, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, and the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki. It includes texts by curator Anna Tellgren, writer Anna-Karin Palm, and the artist's father, the artist George Woodman.

Woodman produced her entire body of work in less than a decade, before her death by suicide at the age of 22. Her photographs have continued to draw exhibitions and study in the decades since, treating the female body as at once physical presence and something closer to apparition.