I remember the first time I came across a Francesca Woodman photograph. It was of a naked figure – hers, it turned out – crumpled up on the floor, seemingly trying to disappear into the crumbling wall behind her. I was fascinated by the mysterious woman in the picture. She seemed so raw, so vulnerable, so forlorn. In short, how we’ve all felt at one time or another.

I was 21, just one year younger, I learned later, than Woodman was when she killed herself by jumping from a Manhattan building in 1981.

Woodman was born to a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado. She started taking photographs in her teens, before studying at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1975 to 1978. The rest of her short life was spent living and working in New York.

At the time of her death, she was a virtual unknown, and had just been turned down for a grant. There has been speculation that this, along with a failed relationship, contributed to her depression, and eventual suicide.

Her self-portraits, mostly in black and white, were rediscovered in the mid-1980s. Of 800 known images she took, only a quarter have been made available to the public. Yet she is now regarded as one of the most important names in contemporary photography, influencing the likes of Cindy Sherman. If her work seems unoriginal in any way, it is only because it has been endlessly copied.

Kim Knoppers, curator at Foam museum in Amsterdam where Woodman' work will be exhibited this month, feels her work remains pertinent today.

“The work is still very fresh because it is relevant to what is happening in photography now. There are many young photographers using their bodies in a performitive way today, putting themselves in the picture, and exploring gender just as Francesca Woodman once did. That is why I was very interested in showing this work right now.”

When her photographs were first exhibited to the public, at a Wellesley College exhibition in 1986, five years after her death, the public found it impossible to separate her work from her tragic life story. Indeed, it is what intrigues many people still.