Cindy Sherman

Biography: from Buffalo to New York, toward photographs of performed identity

Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1954, studied art at Buffalo State College in the early 1970s, and soon based her practice in New York^*1. In Buffalo, the artistic environment around her did not treat photography as a finished, self-contained image. Photography there moved through bodies, disguise, serial images, video, performance, and exhibition. MoMA curator Eva Respini notes that Sherman shifted from painting toward photography as a student and encountered artists who were using the camera within conceptual art and performance^*14. The work of artists such as Eleanor Antin, Hannah Wilke, and Adrian Piper, who used bodies, disguise, sequence, and recorded action to perform or dismantle identity, formed an immediate context for the later Film Stills^*14. Hallwalls, the alternative space Sherman helped found with Robert Longo, Charles Clough, and others, also began in Buffalo as a place for new work across visual art, media, performance, and literature; it encouraged a sense of photography as something that could move between image, body, documentation, and display rather than remain a purified genre^*18. That tendency is already visible in Cover Girl, made in 1976. Apollo describes the work as a sequence of actual women's magazine covers, covers in which Sherman substitutes her own face while mimicking pose and makeup, and further images in which the cover's norm begins to break down^*16. Made between 1977 and 1980, Untitled Film Stills is a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs that MoMA acquired in full in 1995 and exhibited as Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills in 1997^*2. The series evokes publicity stills from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art cinema, but its force lies less in reconstructing any actual movie than in making scenes that feel familiar yet cannot be identified. Through that uncertainty, the work shows how repeated codes from cinema and advertising produce female figures. Sherman used herself not to reveal a private interior life. Using her own body allowed makeup, clothing, expression, pose, gaze, and the timing of the shutter to be built into one process. When she moved to New York, she was responding to more than films seen in theaters. In a New York Magazine interview, Sherman recalled seeing large numbers of women's images for photo-novels at the magazine company where David Salle worked^*15. A photo-novel is a popular printed form in which photographs of actors or models are arranged like comic panels, with speech balloons or short captions carrying a romance, crime, or melodramatic story^*19. Emerging from postwar Italian women's magazine culture, the form linked cinema, comics, and melodrama, using the photograph as a single scene that asks the reader to imagine what came before and after it^*20. What mattered to Sherman was not simply the cheapness of those printed images, but the way one isolated picture could make a viewer invent a relationship, an incident, and a surrounding narrative almost at once^*15. Her early method was not costume as self-introduction. It rebuilt already circulating types of persona—from film, women's magazines, advertising, television, and photographic story magazines—through her own body, clothing, hair, expression, interiors, streets, and camera position. The logic is closer to testing how easily the same body can be read as another person than to revealing "herself." Change the costume or hairstyle, move from a room to a street, alter the height or distance of the camera, and one figure can become an actress, a woman on the run, a working woman, a lonely housewife, or a young woman approaching danger. Sherman has said that, at the time, she was not beginning from an articulated theory of the male gaze or objectification; she was reacting to the tension between her own attraction to makeup and old-fashioned clothing and a contemporary climate in which women were expected to appear natural^*15.

Inventing nonexistent films to unsettle photography's truth effect

The power of Untitled Film Stills lies in using photography's look of having recorded a real moment as the raw material of fiction. In Untitled Film Still #21, for example, The Met explains that Sherman performs a scene associated with mid-century Hollywood tropes while bringing normally invisible production elements to the surface: camera angle, lighting, clothing, and setting^*3. The Broad likewise describes the Film Stills as works that do not quote recognizable films directly but suggest genres, producing figures that feel less like individual actresses than types of persona or role^*4. Sherman appears to photograph one woman, but she is also photographing signs that cinema has trained viewers to read: schoolgirl, secretary, housewife, fugitive, urban career woman. Because the image contains no clear before or after, and because the titles refuse explanation, viewers complete each scene from their own memories of movies, advertising, television, and magazines. The photograph triggers narrative reflexes in the viewer before it reveals anything stable about the subject. Sherman's image is not a decisive moment that captures an event; it is a device that calls up the viewer's learned habits of reading cinema and magazine pictures. Respini writes that the Film Stills are not illustrations of a single theory, yet they belong to a moment when photography's truth claims were under pressure and they exploit the medium's capacity to lie, mask, and seduce^*14. Sherman's historical update was not that she "invented staged photography." Performance and fiction had been present in photography from early on, and Respini places her in a longer line that includes Hippolyte Bayard, the Countess of Castiglione, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Duchamp's Rrose Sélavy^*14. Sherman changed the target of that performance. Disguise was no longer only an eccentric self-portrait or an artist's theatrical masquerade. It became a way to expose the systems through which film, advertising, magazines, and art history make women recognizable as images. Photography could then move away from "accurately showing the person in front of the camera" and toward exposing the visual codes that make that person legible as star, victim, seductress, worker, or upper-class portrait.

Pictures Generation and feminist photography: performing the role an image assigns

Sherman is often discussed in relation to the Pictures Generation. The term comes from Douglas Crimp's 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in New York and names a loose group of artists who used photography, film, video, and performance to examine how images in mass consumer culture shape perception and desire^*6. The Met's 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 presents these artists as inheriting the self-reflexive logic of Minimalism and Conceptual Art while returning to recognizable imagery in order to ask how images shape the way we perceive ourselves and the world^*5. The same essay describes a generation for whom television, film, magazines, and music were almost a weather system, and for whom translations of Foucault, Barthes, and Kristeva helped make identity readable not as a natural interior but as a social construction around gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship^*6. Behind this was the overlap between a postwar consumer society saturated by images and the atmosphere after the civil rights and women's movements, in which artists were asking who had represented whom, and from what position. The Met places these younger artists in a period marked by the Vietnam War, Watergate, the sexual revolution, racial unrest, and assassinations, while also noting the force of the image culture that surrounded them^*6. At the same time, the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s saw women artists move away from passive roles as muse or model and use their own bodies, photography, video, performance, and disguise to rework traditional images of women^*25. The period's question was not simply how to find an authentic "true self." What became urgent was how quickly "selfhood" or "femininity" could be produced in the viewer by circulating poses, clothes, expressions, gazes, rooms, streets, printed images, and film fragments. In that setting, Sherman and Laurie Simmons have been understood as artists who mined visual cultures—B-movies, dollhouses, and other forms between private and collective memory—that seemed fictional yet already felt remembered^*6. With Sherman, the question becomes sharply concrete: what is an individual if a single photograph can make the viewer assign profession, class, desire, danger, and past to a body almost immediately? She did not fix one person inside a single image. She repeated the way the same body, slightly altered by composition, costume, expression, and setting, could be made to carry another occupation, another social class, another desire, another story. What becomes unstable in her work is not only the image of womanhood. It is the viewer's confidence that a single image can disclose a person's character, situation, history, or desire. MoMA describes Sherman as an artist who uses herself as model while drawing from images supplied by film, television, magazines, the internet, and art history to investigate the construction of contemporary identity and representation^*10. In this context, "self-portrait" is too narrow a term. The Broad's 2016 exhibition Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life describes her as working alone in the studio as director, photographer, makeup artist, hairstylist, and subject, performing media-influenced stereotypes of women through varied personas, environments, and costumes^*7. The self appears not as an inner core, but as an accumulation of roles attached from outside. Yokohama Museum of Art's entry for Untitled Film Still #23 notes that the series can be read as questioning images of women as objects of the male gaze, while also emphasizing the ambiguity that prevents Sherman's figures from being reduced to a single emotion or story^*8. Her work is not only "a critique of female representation." It first lets the image being criticized become convincing and attractive, then lets the viewer recognize, often belatedly, how that attraction was built. Sherman's own comments make that distance clear. In a 2008 interview she said she was not working from a fully formulated theory of the male gaze or the objectification of women; she was responding to the contradiction between her interest in makeup and old-fashioned looks and a cultural expectation that women appear natural^*15. This is where feminist photography, staged photography, and postmodern photography meet in her work.

After Centerfolds: gaze, body, aging, and the grotesque

In the 1981 Centerfolds, Sherman moved into a horizontal format close to magazine spreads, creating uneasy relations in which the figure often seems to be viewed from above. The Met's entry for Untitled #87 explains that the series can place the viewer, vicariously, inside a predatory male gaze and that it prompted criticism for not fully distancing itself from objectification^*9. Here, objectification means turning a person into a body or image for desire, consumption, or control before encountering them as a distinct individual. In the Centerfolds, the horizontal frame, reclining body, and averted gaze recall familiar compositions from men's magazines and film. Even if a viewer knows the work is critical, the image first draws that viewer into the position of looking. The criticism, then, was not simply that Sherman exposed the objectification of women, but that the work might also reactivate the desire to see such an objectified image. That tension is why Sherman's photographs do not judge stereotypes from a safe distance. They keep inside the work the very force by which stereotypes attract viewers. From the 1980s onward, she extended her method beyond the cinematic memory of the Film Stills into fashion, fairy tales, myth, historical portraiture, bodily damage, clowns, and upper-class portraits. MoMA's 2012 retrospective names major series including Untitled Film Stills, the Old Master-like History Portraits, and the Society Portraits, organizing the exhibition around artifice and fiction, cinema and performance, horror and the grotesque, myth and carnival, and identities of gender and class^*10. SFMOMA likewise lists the Film Stills, the 1981 Centerfolds, the 1985 fairy-tale and mythological images, the 1988–90 History Portraits, the 1992 Sex Pictures, the 2000 Headshots, the 2002–04 Clowns, several fashion series, and the 2008 Society Portraits as key bodies of work^*11. Across that expansion, the procedure remains consistent. Sherman takes on each period's visual roles with her own body, makes them concrete enough to be believed, and then cracks the surface of that belief.

Turning to art history: Old Masters displaced by photographic artifice

In the later History Portraits / Old Masters, Sherman turns from images of women produced by film and advertising to the portrait types made by art history itself. NGV explains that in this series she moved from early tableaux with a B-movie charge toward art history, working with imagery that evokes Raphael, Caravaggio, Ingres, and others^*22. She borrows composition, costume, pose, and ornament, but never lets the image settle into faithful reconstruction. Clothing, prostheses, heavy makeup, artificial bodies, and props that seem gathered from flea markets roughly unsettle the authority of classical portraiture^*22. Sammlung Goetz places the series as an inquiry into the representation of power and social status in Old Master painting, explaining that the photographs, while dressed as paintings, reveal the artificiality of depiction and self-fashioning^*23. Sherman is not displaying virtuosity by reproducing painting through photography. She shows how the signs long carried by portraiture—authority, beauty, class, gender, and religious value—have been staged through clothing, pose, body, gaze, and material surface^*22. MoMA's audio commentary on Untitled #224 also points to the layered structure in which Sherman takes on Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus: a woman artist performs a male painter, and that male painter is himself performing a god^*24.

Criticism and reception: photographing the system of representation

The important point in Sherman's reception is that her work has been read not only as a model of postmodern photography, but also through the question that shaped feminist photography after the 1970s: how can the female body be represented? In a 1991 essay, Laura Mulvey argued that Sherman was not a didactic theorist, yet her work joined questions of feminist aesthetics, the body, representation, and popular culture, and she placed the early works as re-representations of femininity^*12. Reception never settled into the simple claim that Sherman mattered because she criticized images of women. Respini notes that Untitled Film Stills has attracted several readings that do not always agree: postmodernism, feminism, psychoanalytic accounts of the male gaze, and the culture of spectacle^*14. Craig Owens read Sherman's figures as models of femininity produced by media, while Mulvey emphasized the way gaze and framing draw the viewer into a voyeuristic structure^*14. At the same time, responses to the Centerfolds show that the danger of reactivating the desire under critique became part of the work's reception early on^*9. Sherman's photographs do not reject stereotypes from outside. They allow viewers to be attracted, to invent stories, and at times to enter the position of an aggressive gaze; because of that, admiration and unease have remained intertwined. Her work has been received as something that passes through images of femininity and destabilizes them from within, rather than merely denying them. The Broad's entry for Untitled #122, from a 1983 fashion series, explains that the work registers 1980s high fashion, the dramatization of Hollywood fame, and the pathologizing of powerful female behavior at once^*13. In such works, Sherman uses clothing and makeup not to make a figure beautiful, but to expose the class, desire, fear, age, and aggression that society reads into a woman's appearance. Institutional reception has not reduced this complexity to a photographer's success story. MoMA acquired the complete Untitled Film Stills in 1995, exhibited the entire series in 1997, and in its 2012 retrospective presented more than 170 works across artifice and fiction, cinema and performance, horror and the grotesque, and identities of gender and class^*10. The Broad's 2016 exhibition, drawing on a collection of 127 Sherman works, situated her practice around personas shaped by cinema, advertising, media, and celebrity culture^*7. The National Portrait Gallery's 2019 retrospective presented around 150 works and emphasized how Sherman uses sources from film, advertising, and fashion, together with the manipulation of her own appearance, to explore the tension between appearance and identity^*17. As Studio International's review suggests, part of the photographs' strength is that they leave room for viewers to construct a character's background or story rather than receiving an explained answer^*21. That reception goes beyond the general claim that Sherman is an important artist. Her photographs touch questions to which art after the 1970s repeatedly returned: where is originality located if existing images are reused; how do gender, class, and age become readable as appearance; and is the viewer ever a neutral observer? At a time when photography's promise of evidence was weakening and television, film, magazines, and advertising were shaping everyday gestures and desires, Sherman photographed less the fact that "someone is there" than the mechanism by which someone comes to look like a particular kind of person. In that sense, she expanded photography beyond the record of a person into an apparatus of representation that also includes the viewer's memory, desire, and media experience.