What can you say about a 22-year-old girl who died? In the case of photographer Francesca Woodman, who threw herself out the window of her East Village loft in 1981, quite a bit but hardly enough. The daughter of artists, she began taking photos when she was 13, and found her subject and her style early on. Though friends sometimes appeared in her pictures, Woodman herself, frequently nude, was almost invariably the subject. ''It's a matter of convenience,'' she explained. ''I'm always available.''

Though she appeared in much of the work as an anonymous, fragmented body, a tormented Everywoman, Woodman's presence was fraught with an almost hallucinatory, occasionally alarming level of self-dramatization. In one of her first pictures, clothespins clamp her nipples, navel, and torso; in later photos, she's smeared herself with dirt or paint, bound her legs with tape, or crawled under a shell of peeling wallpaper. In the decaying, abandoned spaces that were her favorite settings, she flails, grovels, jumps, and hides, often dissolving in a blur. Again and again, she reduces her body to a smudge of motion, a memory on film.

This ongoing disappearing act might foreshadow Woodman's final exit, but her work is less about erasure than persistence: the tenacity of an artist determined to find expression for the inexpressible--for desire, rage, confusion, fear. That she used her own body as a vehicle places her firmly in the feminist avant-garde of the late '70s and '80s, alongside Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneemann, while anticipating Cindy Sherman, Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, and other contemporary gender warriors.

Still, there's something wounded about Woodman's work. ''She treats herself like an apparition,'' Philippe Sollers writes here in a poetic, fitfully insightful essay. Only Sloan Rankin dares to sketch in her friend's suicidal state of mind, but Woodman's death remains undiscussed. Attached to such a powerful and personal body of work, the mystery leaves Woodman ripe for iconization, mythicizing, and exploitation. But the inevitable movie of her life couldn't begin to compete with the rich, raw material she's already made of it.