Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #4 1977

  • Not on view

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills is a suite of seventy black-and-white photographs in which the artist posed in the guises of various generic female film characters, among them, ingénue, working girl, vamp, and lonely housewife. Staged to resemble scenes from 1950s and ’60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, the printed images mimic in format, scale, and quality the often-staged “stills” used to promote films. By photographing herself in such roles, Sherman inserts herself into a dialogue about stereotypical portrayals of women. Whether she was the one to release the camera’s shutter or not, she is considered the author of the photographs. However, the works in Untitled Film Stills are not considered self-portraits.

Additional text from Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
7 9/16 × 9 7/16" (19.2 × 24 cm)
Credit
Grace M. Mayer Fund
Object number
813.1995
Copyright
© 2024 Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Department
Photography
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