Cindy Sherman

Biography: from Buffalo to New York, toward photographs that perform a persona

Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1954, studied art at Buffalo State College in the early 1970s, and began working from New York soon afterward^*1. In Buffalo, the artistic environment around her did not treat photography only as a finished, self-contained image. It also 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 a nearby context for what would later become the 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 from 1976. Apollo describes the work as a sequence built from actual women's magazine covers, versions in which Sherman replaced the model's face with her own 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, film noir, and European art cinema, but its importance lies less in the reconstruction of any actual movie than in the making of scenes that seem familiar yet cannot be identified. Through that uncertainty, the work shows how female figures are produced through repeated codes from cinema and advertising. Sherman used herself not because she wanted to reveal her private interior life. Using her own body allowed makeup, clothing, expression, pose, gaze, and the timing of the shutter to be built as one process. When she moved to New York, she was not responding only to 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 a viewer could see one isolated picture and immediately invent a relationship, an incident, and a narrative around it^*15. Her early method, then, was not costume as self-introduction. It was a way of rebuilding already circulating types of persona—drawn from film, women's magazines, advertising, television, and photographic story magazines—through her own body, clothing, hair, expression, interior spaces, streets, and camera position. The logic is closer to testing how easily the same body can be read as another person than to showing "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.

Expression: making nonexistent films to disturb photography's "truth effect"

The force of Untitled Film Stills comes from using photography's appearance of recording a real moment as the very 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 foregrounding production elements that usually disappear from view: 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, generating figures that feel less like individual actresses than types of personality or role^*4. Sherman seems 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 activates narrative reflexes stored in the viewer before it reveals anything stable about the subject. In this sense, Sherman's image is not a decisive moment that captures an event; it is a device that summons the viewer's already learned ways of reading cinematic and magazine images. 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. What Sherman expanded was the target of that performance. Disguise was no longer only an eccentric self-portrait or theatrical masquerade by an individual artist. It became a way to expose the systems through which film, advertising, magazines, and art history produce women as recognizable images. Photography thus moved from "accurately showing the person in front of the camera" toward exposing the visual codes that make that person legible as star, victim, seductress, worker, or upper-class portrait.

The Pictures Generation and feminist photography: performing the role of an image rather than making a self-portrait

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 refers to 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 question of the period was therefore not simply how to find an authentic "true self." What became urgent was the speed with which "selfhood" or "femininity" could be produced inside the viewer by circulating poses, clothes, facial expressions, gazes, rooms, streets, printed images, and film fragments. Within that setting, Sherman and Laurie Simmons have been understood as artists who dug into visual cultures—B-movies, dollhouses, and other forms between private and collective memory—that seemed fictional yet already felt remembered^*6. In Sherman's case, 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 one 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 woman. It is the viewer's confidence that a single image can disclose someone's character, situation, history, or wish. 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 name for the work. 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 the 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 therefore not only "a critique of female representation." It first allows the image being criticized to become convincing and attractive, then lets the viewer recognize, often belatedly, how that attraction was built. Sherman's own comments clarify this distance. 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. That 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 and created uneasy relations in which the figure often seems to be looked down upon. The Met's entry for Untitled #87 explains that the series can place the viewer in a vicariously predatory male gaze and that it prompted criticism for not fully distancing itself from objectification^*9. Objectification here means turning a person into a body or image to be viewed 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 shows why Sherman's photographs do not judge stereotypes from a safe distance. They leave 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 this expansion, the procedure remains consistent. Sherman takes on the visual roles of each period with her own body, makes them concrete enough to be believed, and then cracks the surface of that believability.

Turning to art history: Old Masters displaced by photographic artifice

In the later History Portraits / Old Masters, Sherman turns not only to images of women produced by film and advertising but also 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 she does not close the image as faithful reconstruction. Clothing, prostheses, heavy makeup, artificial bodies, and props that seem gathered from flea markets roughly displace 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 showing virtuosity in reproducing painting through photography. She is showing 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 systems of representation rather than persons

What matters in Sherman's reception is that her work has been read not only as a model of postmodern photography, but also within 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. This reception did not settle into the simple statement that Sherman was important because she criticized images of women. Respini notes that Untitled Film Stills has attracted several readings that sometimes pull against one another: 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, the response to the Centerfolds shows that the danger of reactivating the desire being criticized became part of the work's reception early on^*9. Sherman's photographs do not simply 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 therefore been received as something that passes through the image of femininity and destabilizes it from within, rather than merely denying it. 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 also not reduced this complexity to the success story of a photographer. 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, one strength of her photographs is that they leave room for viewers to construct a character's background or story rather than receiving an explained answer^*21. This reception goes beyond the general claim that Sherman is an important artist. Her photographs touch questions that art after the 1970s repeatedly returned to: 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? In an era when photography's evidentiary promise 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 from the record of a person into an apparatus of representation that also includes the viewer's memory, desire, and media experience.