National Portrait Gallery

St Martin’s Place, London

Julia Margaret Cameron is well-known for her portraits of others, often poetically staged allegories. While Francesca Woodman’s work is widely assumed to be self-portraiture, she, like Cameron, worked within a circle of friends and contemporaries who often posed for her. This fact is clear from Woodman’s notes, contact sheets and photographs in which she described friends who might be suitable and available for a given idea, then enacted over a series of camera exposures.

Over the course of their careers, both Woodman and Cameron favored particular models, who could easily be considered muses. These sitters appear again and again, at times distinctly as themselves or alternately because their features fit the part that the artist had envisioned. For Cameron, these included her niece, Julia Jackson, whom she photographed more than 50 times over 10 years and her daughter-in-law Annie Chinery Cameron, who both posed in elegant portraits and as Zuleika in a scene from the heroic poem “The Bride of Abydos.” Woodman frequently photographed her boyfriend, the glass artist Benjamin Moore, as well as RISD classmate Sloan Rankin, and Sabina Mirri, an Italian painter she met at the Maldoror bookshop in Rome who she described as having “a nose like Dantes [sic].” Lucy Handley appeared repeatedly in the fashion-oriented photographs Woodman made during her last semester in Providence and her early days in New York, and was also transformed into Leda of the Greek myth.

‍

Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.