Just announced – The National Portrait Gallery’s forthcoming programme, featuring Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In will take place in spring 2024 (21 March–30 June).

Photographers Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron are two of the most influential women in the history of photography. They lived a century apart – Cameron working in the UK and Sri Lanka from the 1860s, and Woodman in America and Italy from the 1970s. Both women explored portraiture beyond its ability to record appearance – using their own creativity and imagination to suggest notions of beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling.

Showcasing more than 150 rare vintage prints, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In spans the career of both artists – and suggests new ways to look at their work, and the way photographic portraiture was created in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Image: Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots #5, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Gelatin silver print

Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation

© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London