Francesca Woodman has been deemed “the Sylvia Plath of photography,” which is never a good sign.

Francesca Woodman was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1958 to two artists, George and Betty Woodman. She had a peaceful childhood split between Boulder and the Florentine countryside in Italy, where her family lived on a farm. Her parents encouraged both Francesca and her older brother Charles to be artists, which was easy enough because Charles was talented and Francesca was a prodigy. They were constantly having visiting artists over like David Hockney and Richard Serra. No matter where they were, “art was a serious business.”

You know how when you first try something, you have to try and fail several times before you really get the hang of it? Photography wasn’t like that for Francesca. She was pretty much immediately talented after she was handed a camera at the age of 13. She started at RISD in 1975, studied in Rome for a RISD honors program between 1977 and 1978 and graduated in 1978. Despite the fact that she was immensely skilled, Francesca couldn’t get famous. Due to depression, this was not something she could take lightly and she made her first attempt to kill herself. Luckily she was unsuccessful, but afterwards she was forced to move in with her parents in Manhattan, go to therapy and take medication. Then there was a lull. She made some progress and but then her bike was stolen, her relationship with her boyfriend at the time was circling the drain and worst of all, an application for a grant for the National Endowment of the Arts was denied. It was too much to bear and on January 19, 1981 Francesca jumped from a loft window in Manhattan to her death.

From that point on, her work became defined by her suicide. Her pictures, which were already ghost-like due to movement of her and her models during a long exposure time, now were seen as arrows pointing to her suicide. She started getting solo shows and now has works in the permanent collections of the Met and the Whitney. But what people don’t see in her work is that she, as her good friend Betsy Berne describes her, “was a genuine nut, the good kind.” “She was very loyal and intense. She was the kind of person you either loved or hated.” You can decide whether you love or hate her after you watch the documentary about her life, "The Woodmans."