Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #21. 1978. Gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 × 9 1/2" (19.1 × 24.1 cm). Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel ©️ 2022 Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

“I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”

Cindy Sherman

For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo—who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.

Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”1 Shortly after moving to New York, she produced her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), in which she put on guises and photographed herself in various settings with deliberately selected props to create scenes that resemble those from mid-20th-century B movies. Started when she was only 23, these images rely on female characters (and caricatures) such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naif. Sherman used cinematic conventions to structure these photographs: they recall the film stills used to promote movies, from which the series takes its title. The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works.

Sherman has continued to transform herself, displaying the diversity of human types and stereotypes in her images. She often works in series, improvising on themes such as centerfolds (1981) and society portraits (2008). Untitled #216, from her history portraits (1981), exemplifies her use of theatrical effects to embody different roles and her lack of attempt to hide her efforts: often her wigs are slipping off, her prosthetics are peeling away, and her makeup is poorly blended. She highlights the artificiality of these fabrications, a metaphor for the artificiality of all identity construction.

While she sometimes portrays glamorous characters, Sherman has always been more interested in the grotesque. In the 1980s and 1990s, series such as the disasters (1986–89) and the sex pictures (1992) confronted viewers with the strange and ugly aspects of humanity in explicit, visceral images. “I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful; I’m much more fascinated with the other side,”2 she said in 1986. At the time, images of ailing bodies were painfully on view in the news during the AIDS crisis; these added poignancy to her investigation of the grotesque and of various types of violence that could be done to the body. In these series and throughout all of her work, Sherman subverts the visual shorthand we use to classify the world around us, drawing attention to the artificiality and ambiguity of these stereotypes and undermining their reliability for understanding a much more complicated reality.

Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, 2016

  1. John Waters, “A Conversation with Cindy Sherman,” in Cindy Sherman, edited by Eva Respini (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 69.

  2. Larry Frascella, “Cindy Sherman’s Tales of Terror,” Aperture 86.103 (Summer 1986): 49.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collection Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies).
Wikidata
Q229455
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Nationality
American
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Cinematographer, Photographer
Name
Cindy Sherman
Ulan
500104869
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

99 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Cindy Sherman: Centerfold (Untitled #96) Paperback, 48 pages
  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Art Making with MoMA: 20 Activities for Kids Inspired by Artists at The Museum of Modern Art Paperback, 128 pages
  • Being Modern: Building the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 288 pages
  • The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 152 pages
  • Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now Hardcover, 368 pages
  • Cindy Sherman Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 264 pages
  • Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 88 pages
  • The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 256 pages
  • Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 168 pages
  • Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 164 pages

Media

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