ABSTRACT
Photographer Francesca Woodman and photographer and earthworks and body artist Ana Mendieta share the unhappy fate of being artists who did not get the chance to develop their work over the course of a long life; Woodman died at 22 and Mendieta at 36. The Silueta images that Mendieta created at Salina Cruz (1976) are among the most powerful in the larger series of images that she called Siluetas. The images photographed at Salina Cruz show the outline of a woman's body that Mendieta traced in the sand near the boundary of the ocean. Born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1958, Francesca Woodman was something of a photography prodigy. She began taking striking and memorable photographs as a young teen. Woodman's abandoned house images are hauntingly real, even as they were entirely staged. Woodman went to abandoned spaces, moved in props, and photographed herself amid very carefully planned and constructed scenes.
