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When a struggling artist commits suicide by jumping from a window at the tender age of 22, it usually entails that no one will ever see his or her work. Or, if his or her work actually does make it onto a gallery’s walls, it is valued most often for the eerie thrill that comes with trying to uncover signs of the future tragedy. But Francesca Woodmans death in 1981 led to a fascinating and ever-evolving critical debate over her small body of modest black-and-white photographs, which gained exposure with an exhibition shortly after her death that was organized by Wellesley College Museum and the Hunter College Art Gallery.

That show’s catalogue, with essays by Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, placed Woodman’s work within the realm of feminist discourse, and led students and professors of photography to take seriously her weird and often heavy-handed self-portraits and her staged images of her (mostly female) friends. This new show, which pairs her work with the early photographs of Justine Kurland, proves that there is a reason for this insistent focus on the former Rhode Island School of Design student’s tiny body of slight images.

Her photographs are haunting with or without any foreknowledge of her biography. They employ many of the tricks made possible by the very technology of her medium — including multiple exposures, which allow her to create ghostly doubles, and long exposures that leave wispy, ectoplasmic trails in the wake of her moving subjects. She uses the reductive flattening of three-dimensional forms that takes place in the making of a photograph, as well as the distortions of perspective that come with using a medium-format lens to create unsettling, surreal spaces.

The images are often taken from a childlike perspective, from very low to the ground, and many of the works in this show depict bodies whose heads are cropped out of the frame, as if the adults are too lofty to be seen from such a lowly perspective. Other young women are shown naked, with their faces hidden behind photographs of the artist. These works make the camera feel like a window into deeply buried, opaque, and tangled webs of the artist’s psychology. They seem like dreams ripe for Freudian or metaphorical interpretation.

Kurland’s pieces, on the other hand, seem to depict the straightforward adolescent girl’s dream of running away with her pals and living a feral and empowered life, unencumbered by adults and their rules. From the photographer’s "Girls Pictures" series, which she stopped adding to six years ago, this work seems to represent a kind of more brazen, sexier version of the "Box Car Children" narrative. Things go wrong for the girls — in one image a young lady, herself covered in leeches, picks the blood-suckers from her cohort’s back, posed beside a lovely lake — but the images are luminous and hopeful. It seems as if these robust young women will overcome all of their crises.

Press materials for the show compare the works of both photographers to Peter Weirs vaguely ominous film "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and Peter Jacksons gory "Heavenly Creatures," but it seems that these parallels only make sense if you take Kurland and Woodman’s work together — for while the former presents not always perfect but mostly idyllic scenes of a kind of utopian dream, the latter begins to represent its violent, terrifying breakdown.

Kurland’s new work (not included in the show) is even lovelier and more complex than her work here. She is now traveling around the country, living in a minivan that she has personally outfitted with curtains, bedding, and storage compartments for her photographic equipment, shooting subcultural communities and the natural landscapes in which they live. Both her and Woodman’s somewhat immature bodies of work that are on view are captivating — Kurland’s because it shows the seedlings of what is sure to be an interesting career, and Woodman’s because it is all that will ever exist to hint at what the remarkable young woman might have some day produced.

The prints hang in a kind of face-off on the gallery walls, with Kurland’s large, light, airy prints staring down the small, dark, and moody photographs by Woodman. Rounding out these groupings, in a display case by the door, is a small collection of Brian Belotts "Kook Books," collage books in which the artist has pasted wild and wonderful images directly on top of the pages of children’s books. These serve as a lighthearted and amusing complement to the showdown of twisted, youthful utopias going on in the adjacent two rooms.