In 1972, at the age of 13, Francesca Woodman photographed herself sitting on the end of a sofa at her home in Boulder, Colorado. The room looks like a studio; Woodman’s parents were artists, and there’s a sliver of easel behind her. A grey blur seems to issue from her half-raised left hand and flood the bottom of the black and white picture like a fog. The blur has been generated partly by the out-of-focus cable release she used to take the photograph; the rest has been achieved in the darkroom. The photographer herself is in focus, but she’s buried inside a big cable-knit sweater and has turned her head away so that her darkish blonde hair is all we see. (There’s something monstrous and comic about this faceless head, like the hairball Cousin Itt from The Addams Family or the unkempt ghost in Hideo Nakata’s film Ringu.) Her right arm is a blaze of light on the arm of the sofa, so overexposed that the hand seems to hover unattached: the only expressive gesture in a picture that is all veils and avoidance.

So much of Woodman’s subsequent imagery and artifice is already present in Self-Portraitat 13 that it almost undoes any sense of her development as a photographer. There is the domestic yet mysterious setting, the Gothic ambitions, the use of blurs conjured by various technical means, the deployment, both open and furtive, of her own body. The atmosphere in her photographs is literary – tricked up out of Lewis Carroll, Poe and Surrealism – as well as knowingly indebted to photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Duane Michals. One of the effects of the current survey of her work at Victoria Miro (until 22 January) is that one keeps imagining there’s a photographic education going on, only to discover that some particularly sophisticated or unsettling image – the artist half-buried in lakeside mud or become a hazy whorl inside a mirror – was taken in the first three years of her career. Woodman seems to have arrived fully formed as an artist and done her enigmatic, theatrical and sometimes naive thing until she stopped.

That’s to say, for only nine years. She was given a camera by her father at 13 and three years later enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She spent time in Florence and Rome, and in 1980 was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Much of her best work grew out of school projects and assignments. She published just one book, a week before she died. At the age of 22, after a period of depression, some apparent setbacks in her career and the end of a relationship, she threw herself from a window in New York. Her suicide is part of the Woodman mythology – it couldn’t be otherwise, given the fragility she exhibits and the morbidity she courts in the work – but it has not really determined her reputation. Instead of a doomed prodigy, she’s long been acknowledged as an artist with a keen sense of photographic history and a subtle take on certain vexing issues of her day: the relation of performance to its photographic record, the extent to which one could play critically with the clichés of femininity, the inherent falsity of photography itself.

‘Self-Portrait at 13, Boulder, Colorado’ (1972).