The purpose of the talk is to analyze Francesca Woodman's subversion and re-signification of the self-portrait genre from a semiotic approach. I will discuss issues related to the real, imaginary, and symbolic from the perspective of the body as a medium of communication. It should be emphasized that Woodman's dazzling photographic production speaks not only of her — despite the autobiographical tone of her work —, but it is also about otherness, about the social and cultural representation of all selves, and about how a body in the world is intertwined with biopolitical issues. Woodman's precocious and prodigious talent is not limited to experimenting with boldness or certain insolence regarding the photographic techniques: her talent is committed to creating intense and particular narratives often accompanied by texts and mis-en-scène. Her pale, ghostly or fragmented body blends into empty, decayed spaces and interacts with broken, forgotten and destroyed objects as the protagonist of very impacting scenes. She produces what to some extent can be referred to as "anti-portraits" for she found a way of transcending the basic aestheticism of the genre by creating unfocused or even faceless portraits of herself, and by introducing the idea of intense movement to her pictures. These subversive ideas help to transform the images in the antithesis of the canonical description of self-portraits — most of the times characterized by the artist as the model, statically posed as if she was reflected in a mirror. There is a multitude of subject-matter and of semiotic layers in Woodman's photographs, which causes the viewer to find hard to apprehend their meaning without thinking about the whole set of qualities that makes each image possible. It is laborious to fully capture the comprehensiveness of Woodman's work for it implies of being aware of her permanent challenging the categories of opposition such as life/death, inside/outside, body/spectrum, presence/absence, self/environment, and subject/object. The following authors will be referred to: C.S. Peirce, Lucia Santaella, Vincent Colapietro, Christine Greiner, Göran Sonesson, H. U. Gumbrecht, Graham Clarke, Chris Townsend, Annateresa Fabris, among others.