Cindy Sherman

For more information on Cindy Sherman, visit Britannica.com.

(b Glenn Ridge, NJ, 1954). American photographer. While still growing up she was drawn to the television environment of the 1960s and fascinated by disguise and make-up. She studied art at Buffalo State College (1972-6), concentrating on photography, which she maintained is the appropriate medium of expression in our media-dominated civilization. Her photographs are portraits of herself in various scenarios that parody stereotypes of woman. A panoply of characters and settings is drawn from sources of popular culture: old movies, television soaps and pulp magazines. Sherman rapidly rose to celebrity status in the international art world during the early 1980s with the presentation of a series of untitled 'film stills' in various group and solo exhibitions across America and Europe. Among 130 'film stills' taken between 1978 and 1980 are portraits of Sherman in the role of such screen idols as Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe. While the mood of Sherman's early works ranges from quiet introspection to provocative sensuality, there are elements of horror and decay in the series from 1988-9. Studies from the early 1990s make pointed caricatures of characters depicted through art history, with Sherman appearing as a grotesque creature in period costume. Her approach forms an ironic message that creation is impossible without the use of prototypes; identity lies in appearance, not in reality. In this, the artist has assimilated, even while retaining a critical stance, the visual tyranny of television, advertising and magazines. Sherman's work has been categorized with that of Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Richard Prince (b 1949). Works are held in the Tate Gallery, London, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, as well as in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums, New York.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Cindy Sherman (born 1954) used photography to challenge images in popular culture and the mass media. Her work concentrated on examining the way women are viewed by society. She used herself as a model in the 1977-1980 series of 69 black-and-white photographs called "Untitled Film Stills." Sherman's later series included themes of pornography, Old Master paintings, and fairy tales, as well as dismembered medical dummies in graphic poses.

Cynthia Morris Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, on January 19, 1954 and was raised in suburban Long Island, New York. Her father's hobby was collecting cameras and taking family photos. As a child Sherman spent a lot of time playing dress-up, an activity that she later used in her work. In 1972, Sherman enrolled at the State University College at Buffalo, New York, as an art education major, where she began studying painting. Sherman painted self-portraits and realistic images she found in magazines and photographs. She failed her introductory photography course because of difficulty with the technological aspects of print-making.

Introduced to Conceptual Art

In 1975, Sherman was introduced to conceptual art, which had a liberating effect on her. She returned to her childhood love of dress-up in her work, spending many hours trying to transform her appearance. She would then go out so that others could see her "work." Sherman now saw the potential of using photography to unleash her creativity. In 1975, she produced a series entitled "Cutouts" in which she was the character in her made up plot. She then took the photographs and cut them out and arranged them on paper panels. These works were included in an exhibit of New York artists. By the end of her second photography class, Sherman realized she would never paint again.

Upon graduation in 1977, at the age of 23, Sherman moved to New York City. She continued her role-playing and began photographing herself in her apartment, outdoors in New York City, on Long Island, and in the Southwest. Sherman shot most of the photographs, but family and friends took others. She posed in a repertoire of images familiar from popular culture. The prints were small black-and-whites. There were 69 photographs in the series, entitled "Untitled Film Stills," which Sherman created between 1977 and 1980.

Sherman's characters in the "Untitled Film Stills" were not specified, allowing viewers to construct their own narratives. She encouraged viewer participation by hinting, through the poses, that she was the object of someone's gaze. Her film stills looked and functioned just like real film stills, 8 x 10 inch glossies designed to lure the viewer into a drama, made all the more compelling because they were not real. "She's good enough to be a real actress," said pop artist Andy Warhol in comments included at the web site of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The entire series was first exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, in 1995. It depicted the different identities that women have held since World War II. Similar characters appear in several photographs, forming mini-series within the larger group. The first six images depicted the same blond actress at different points in her career. In each shot, Sherman was alone, a familiar but unidentifiable film heroine in an appropriate setting. The portrayals included a floozy in a slip with a martini, a perky B-movie librarian, a secretary in the city, a voluptuous, a working class woman from an Italian neo-realist film, an innocent runaway, and a film noir victim. In some images, Sherman appears as a seductress. Amanda Cruz in Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, quotes Sherman as saying "to pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality-growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl." Through her work, she asked viewers to question the way media images influence our ideas about gender roles.

At the Masters of Photography website, critic Lisa Philips is quoted as saying that Sherman's photographs "project a … mixture of desire, anticipation, victimization, and suffering," and as a photographer she deflected the gaze of the viewer away from her subject and "toward reproduction itself, forcing the viewers to recognize their own conditioning." Sherman's use of photography is predicated on the uses and functions of photography in the mass media, in advertising, fashion, movies, pinups, and magazines. Cruz said "Cindy Sherman began her now famous series "Untitled Film Stills" twenty years ago, at the end of 1977. Those small, black-and-white photographs of Sherman impersonating various female character types from old B movies and film noir spoke to a generation of baby boomer women who had grown up absorbing those glamorous images on television, taking such portrayals as cues for their future. With each subsequent series of photographs, Sherman imitated and confronted assorted representational tropes, exploring the myriad ways in which women and the body are depicted by effective contemporary image-makers, including the mass media and historical sources such as fairy tales, portraiture, and surrealist photography."

As early as 1979, articles about Sherman's work appeared in Arts Magazine and October. In nearly ten years she had over 30 one-person shows at prestigious museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Over 100 articles in such publications as Life, the Village Voice, Vogue, Art Forum and the Wall Street Journal have featured Sherman and her work.

Work Changed in Tone

In 1981, Sherman opened her first one-person show. As the 1980s progressed, her style began to change, becoming much darker. While Sherman worked for a clothing line, she produced photos that included very bizarre characters and poses. In the series "Fairy Tales," the typical images of fairy tales were replaced with death and decay. Monsters and beings with grotesque body parts exaggerated the male and female stereotypes in Western art. Sherman looked at the violence and horror in fairy tales and their sexual underpinnings.

"Sex Pictures" contained grotesque and surreal images created with mannequins and prosthetic devices. In Sherman's most graphic photos, she began to use body parts found at medical schools and incorporated them into her pictures. These body parts were intended to question the sexual tendencies of our culture.

Sherman turned to Old Master paintings for further inspiration, and created a series of photographs in which she was dressed as figures in famous works by Caravaggio, Raphael, and others. These photographs crossed the boundaries between postmodern playfulness and the exploration of self through portraiture. "Historical Portraits" is a photographic series devoted to reinventing classical high art using large color photographs. "Salome and the head of John the Baptist" was an important scene for the Symbolists of the late 1800s. Most artists painted this scene. Sherman also tried her hand at this subject. Her image "Untitled a 228" shows Salome holding a knife and the severed head of a wrinkled old man.

"Untitled a 204" is a photograph based on Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' "Madame Moitessier." Ingres painted a middle-age woman reclining on a couch, dressed formally with elegant bracelets and a necklace. Sherman's interpretation is quite different. The face of Sherman's Madame is bruised and the clothes and jewelry are less elegant. Sherman juxtaposes how women were depicted in art with how women are actually treated. In one photo, Sherman exposes milk-swollen (plastic) breasts and holds a (false) pregnant belly under a shawl.

"Untitled Film Stills" Bought for $1 Million

In 1978, Sherman received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She also was given a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1995. The art market crash of the 1990s spared her, unlike many contemporaries. In December 1995, the Museum of Modern Art purchased the complete "Untitled Film Stills" for a reported $1 million, and exhibited the collection in 1997. The purchase insured that this landmark body of work would be preserved in its entirety in a single public collection.

Joining artist-directors like Robert Longo, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle, Sherman was signed in 1996 by Miramax to direct a low-budget film about an office worker turned serial killer.

Sherman's photographs can be found in a large number of museum collections and private galleries. Her work has been shown at the Ansel Adams Center of Photography in San Francisco and at A Gallery in New Orleans, but most of her showings are held in New York City. "Cindy Sherman: Retrospective" was exhibited at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, in 1998. The show also traveled to Prague, London, Bordeaux, Sydney, and Toronto. Sherman lives in New York and continues to produce personal work as well as commercial commissions.

Further Reading

Schjeldahl, Peter, Cindy Sherman, Pantheon, 1984.

Smith, Elizabeth A. T., Amelia Jones, and Amanda Cruz, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, Thames & Hudson, 1997.

"Cindy Sherman," Elsa Dorfman Photography Reviews,http://elsa.photo.net/cindy.htm (April 13, 1999).

"Cindy Sherman," Masters of Photography,http://www.mastersof-photography.com/S/sherman/sherman.html (April 13, 1999).

"Cindy Sherman," The Eli Broad Family Foundation,http://www.broadartfdn.org/bio-shermanb.html (April 13, 1999).

Sherman, Cindy (b. 1954), American photographer and celebrated contemporary artist. Her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), begun after her BA at State University College of Buffalo, New York, attracted instant attention. This was a series of black-and-white photographs inspired by 1950s film adverts in which, as in all her later work, she performed simultaneously as model, photographer, make-up artist, and designer. The images did not make reference to any particular movie or autobiographical narrative, but to stereotypes of female heroines in films. Moving to colour, she continued to point to the socially constructed nature of femininity by subverting culturally prevalent images. In her Untitled series of 1981, Sherman used the horizontal, looking-down format of the ‘centrefolds’ in pornographic magazines, but frustrated the expectations of the genre, using discordant and unsettling poses. In Fashion Pictures (1983-4; her images are untitled, and numbered in one continuous sequence) the smooth appeal of fashion photographs is disturbed by angry or inane poses, scarred faces, or the appearance of bodily fluids, as if the models were beginning to physically reject the masquerade of femininity. While ‘the feminine struggle to conform to a facade of desirability’ (Laura Mulvey) continued to haunt Sherman's iconography, her images from the later 1980s and 1990s seem to reveal the monstrous otherness behind the masquerade. Loosely based on myth, horror, and fairy tales, they feature characters of uncertain gender and species, enlarged glistening organs, ozzing orifices, decomposing body parts, and foodstuff tainted by vomit and decay, all rendered vividly by her accomplished use of deeply saturated prints. Her amazing, almost painterly make-up, and costumes, prostheses, and lighting, are used to recreate generic old masters in a series, History Portraits (1988-90), that seems to investigate the art-historical dimension of the contradictions and anxieties explored in her previous work.

Returning to her preoccupation with female identity, her late work seems to reference the ‘makeover’ photographs advertised at the back of women's magazines (2000-2). We still wince at the fashion mistakes, bad skin, and excessive make-up of Sherman's protagonists as they struggle to fulfil familiar clichés of successful femininity, precariously balanced between the ridiculous and the poignant. In this respect, they are conceptually related to the Clowns included in a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2003. Sherman's work has attracted much attention from feminist critics, who have seen it as a positive act of resistance to dominant constructions of femininity.

— Patrizia di Bello

Bibliography

• Mulvey, L., ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’, New Left Review, 188 (1991; repr. in L. Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (1996)).
• Krauss, R., Bachelors (1999).
• Steiner, R., “‘Cast of Characters’”, in Cindy Sherman (2003)

Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman
Birth name	Cindy Sherman
Born	January 19, 1954 (1954-01-19) (age 55) Glen Ridge, New Jersey
Nationality	American
Field	photographer
Training	Buffalo State College
Works	Complete Untitled Film Stills, 1977-1980
Awards	MacArthur Fellowships

Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American photographer and film director of Office Killer, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Award. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in Europe and Metro Pictures gallery in New York.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Photographic career 2.1 The Untitled Film Stills 2.2 Other works 3 Film career 4 Awards 5 Personal life 6 Popular culture 7 Books 8 Film and video 9 Quotes 10 Bibliography 11 References 12 External links

Early years

Cindy Sherman was born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island.

Sherman became interested in the visual arts at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. Frustrated with what she saw as the medium's limitations, she abandoned the form and took up photography. "[T]here was nothing more to say [through painting]," she later recalled. "I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead." She spent the rest of her college career focused on photography. Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credits with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms.^[1] While in college she met Robert Longo who encouraged her to record her process of dolling up for parties, and together with Charles Clough, created Hallwalls, an arts center.

Photographic career

Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. For example, in her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. A series, dated 2003, features her as clowns. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines. When talking about one of her centerfold pictures Cindy stated, "In content I wanted a man opening up the magazine suddenly look at it with an expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be. Looking at this woman who is perhaps a victim. I didn't think of them as victims at the time... But I suppose... Obviously I'm trying to make someone feel bad for having a certain expectation."^[2]

In response to the NEA funding controversy involving photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, Sherman produced the Sex series in 1989. These photographs featured pieced-together medical dummies in flagrante delicto. Like much of Sherman's work, many critics find the series both disturbing and funny.

In her work, Sherman is both revealed and hidden, named and nameless. She explained to the New York Times in 1990, "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear."^[3]

In 2006, The Jeu de Paume museum in Paris hosted an exhibition of Sherman's works, “Cindy Sherman: A Retrospective.” It included works spanning 30 years from 1975 to 2005.

What emerges through these images is a subtle analysis of individual identity, both the fantasies that it generates and the forces that shape it. This immersion in the uncertain, conflictual zones where individual identity struggles with the collective imaginary, stereotypes and issues of symbolic power, can be either playful or—when it touches on horror and repulsion, on the decay and dismembering of the body—very dark.

^[4]

The Untitled Film Stills

The Untitled Film Stills are all black and white photos in which Sherman places herself as an unnamed actress in shots reminiscent of foreign films, Hollywood pictures, B-movies, and film noir. Sherman used her own possessions as props, or sometimes borrowed, as in Untitled Film Still #11 in which the doggy pillow belongs to a friend. The shots were also largely taken in her own apartment. The Untitled Film Stills fall into several distinct groups:

• The first six are grainy and slightly out of focus (e.g. Untitled #4), and each of the 'roles' appears to be played by the same blonde actress.
• The next group was taken in 1978 at Robert Longo's family beach house on the north fork of Long Island. (Sherman met Longo during her sophomore year, and they were a couple until late 1979)
• Later in 1978, Sherman began taking shots in outdoor locations around the city. E.g. Untitled Film Still #21
• Sherman later returned to her apartment, preferring to work from home. She created her version of a Sophia Loren character from the movie Two Women. (E.g. Untitled Film Still #35 (1979))
• She took several photographs in the series while preparing for a trip to Arizona with her parents. Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), also known as The Hitchhiker, was shot at sunset one evening during the trip.
• The remainder of the series was shot around New York, like Untitled #54, often featuring a blonde victim typical of film noir.

Other works

In addition to her film stills, Sherman has appropriated a number of other visual forms— the centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image. These and other series, like the 1980s "Fairy Tales and Disasters" sequence, are shown at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City.

In 2006, Sherman created a series of fashion advertisements for designer Marc Jacobs. The advertisements themselves were photographed by photographer Juergen Teller and released as a monograph on April the 4th by Rizzoli.

In the early 1990s, Sherman worked with Minneapolis band Babes in Toyland, photographing covers for the albums Fontanelle and Painkillers, creating a stage backdrop used in live concerts, and acting in the promotional video for the song "Bruise Violet."

Film career

Sherman has also worked as a film director; her first film was Office Killer in 1997, starring Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald and Carol Kane. She played a cameo role in John Waters' film, Pecker.

Awards

In 1995, Sherman was the recipient of one of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as the "Genius Awards." This fellowship grants $500,000 over five years, no strings attached, to important scholars in a wide range of fields, to encourage their future creative work.

Personal life

Sherman and musician David Byrne started dating in 2007.^[5]

Popular culture

Sherman has been referenced by the electroclash artists Chicks on Speed in the track "Spoken by Stephanie from Marseille, Yes I Do" from the 2000 K Records album The Re-Releases of the Un-Releases. The song refers to Sherman through the lyrics, "...got more faces than Cindy Sherman." Sherman was also the topic of the song "Cindy of a Thousand Lives", from Billy Bragg's 1991 album Don't Try This at Home.

The Cherry Poppin' Daddies' song "Grand Mal" contains a reference to Sherman's work in the description of the narrator's love interest: "She takes Cindy Sherman pictures/And she cuts herself."

She's also the subject of The Shermans' song, "Cindy Sherman".

Singer Róisín Murphy has admitted the music video for her song You Know Me Better is inspired by Sherman, as well as to having been influenced by her visual style throughout her career.

Books

• Johanna Burton (ed.), ed (2006). Cindy Sherman. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-52463-5. 
• (2007) Cindy Sherman: A Play of Selves.Hatje Cantz. ISBN 978-3775719421.
• (2006) Cindy Sherman: Working Girl.Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. ISBN 978-0971219588.
• (2004) Cindy Sherman: Centerfolds. Skarstedt Fine Art. ISBN 0-9709090-2-0.
• (2003) Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills. Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0-87070-507-5.
• (2002) Elisabeth Bronfen, et al. Cindy Sherman: Photographic Works 1975-1995 (Paperback). Schirmer/Mosel. ISBN 3-88814-809-X.
• (2001) Early Work of Cindy Sherman. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. ISBN 0-9654020-3-7.
• (2000) Leslie Sills, et al. In Real Life: Six Women Photographers. Holiday House. ISBN 0-8234-1498-1.
• (2000) Amanda Cruz, et al. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective (Paperback). Thames & Hudson, ISBN 0-500-27987-X.
• (1999) Essential, The: Cindy Sherman. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., ISBN 0-8109-5808-2.
• (1999) Shelley Rice (ed.) Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-68106-4.

Film and video

• Cindy Sherman [videorecording] : Transformations. by Paul Tschinkel; Marc H Miller; Sarah Berry; Stan Harrison; Cindy Sherman; Helen Winer; Peter Schjeldahl; Inner-Tube Video. 2002, 28 minutes, Color. NY: Inner-Tube Video.

• Two filmmakers completed a feature documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, about one of the filmmakers' former relationship with Sherman. She was initially supportive, but later opposed the project.^[6]

Quotes

• "I can’t work without it. And it has to be the right kind, because if it’s not then I get into a bad mood. I work with a remote so that I can change CDs instantly if I need to. (Sherman talking about her need to have music on while working)"
• "I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity."
• "I was supporting myself, but nothing like the guy painters, as I refer to them. I always resented that actually.. we were all getting the same amount of press, but they were going gangbusters with sales."
• "When I do work, I get so much done in such a concentrated time that once I’m through a series, I’m so drained I don’t want to get near the camera."
• "I was feeling guilty in the beginning; it was frustrating to be successful when a lot of my friends weren’t. Also, I was constantly being reminded of that by people in my family making jokes."
• "If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of."
• "The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff."

Bibliography

• Michael Kelly, "Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman", In: M. A. Holly & K. Moxey (eds.), Art history, Aesthetics, Visual studies. Massachusetts: Clark Art Institute, 2002.

References

1. ^ Belasco, Daniel http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-131200189.html Art in America, 2005-4-1
2. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsow0QaKJAM
3. ^ New York Times, 1 February 1990, "A Portraitist's Romp Through Art History."
4. ^ Cindy Sherman at Jeu de Paume, ARTINFO, May 17, 2006, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/15426/cindy-sherman-at-jeu-de-paume/, retrieved 2008-04-17 
5. ^ George Rush (2009-02-22). "Ex-'Head' David Byrne talks about working with Brian Eno". Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2009/02/22/2009-02-22_exhead_david_byrne_talks_about_working_w.html. Retrieved 2009-04-03. 
6. ^ Cindy Sherman's response retrieved June 24, 2008

External links

• 1995 frieze review
• Interview with Cindy Sherman
• 1985 Review by Elsa Dorfman
• 1990 New York Times Profile
• Metro Pictures Slide Show, 1978-2005
• "The Complete Untitled Film Stills" exhibition (1997) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Cindy Sherman in artfacts
• Cindy Sherman new exhibition and artnews

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