Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American photographer known for her images—particularly her elaborately “disguised” self-portraits—that comment on social role-playing and sexual stereotypes.

Sherman grew up on Long Island, New York. In 1972 she enrolled at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and majored in painting, later switching her major to photography. She graduated from SUNY in 1976 and in 1977 began work on Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), one of her best-known series. The series of 8 × 10-inch black-and-white photographs featuring Sherman in a variety of roles is reminiscent of film noir and presents viewers with an ambiguous portrayal of women as sex objects. Sherman stated that the series was “about the fakeness of role-playing as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy.” She continued to be the model in her photographs, donning wigs and costumes that evoke images from the realms of advertising, television, film, and fashion and that, in turn, challenge the cultural stereotypes supported by these media.

During the 1980s Sherman began to use colour film, to exhibit very large prints, and to concentrate more on lighting and facial expression. Using prosthetic appendages and liberal amounts of makeup, Sherman moved into the realm of the grotesque and the sinister with photographs that featured mutilated bodies and reflected such concerns as eating disorders, insanity, and death. Her work became less ambiguous, focusing perhaps more on the results of society’s acceptance of stereotyped roles for women than upon the roles themselves.

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Sherman returned to ironic commentary upon clichéd female identities in the 1990s, introducing mannequins into some of her photographs, and in 1997 she directed the dark comedic film Office Killer. Two years later she exhibited disturbing images of savaged dolls and doll parts that explored her interest in juxtaposing violence and artificiality. Sherman continued these juxtapositions in a 2000 series of photographs in which she posed as Hollywood women with overblown makeup and silicone breast implants, again achieving a result of enigmatic pathos. That same year a major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A 2012 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City was accompanied by a film series comprising movies that Sherman saw as having influenced her work.

In 2016 Sherman was awarded the Praemium Imperiale prize in painting, a category that also encompasses photography. That same year she debuted a series of new photographs in the exhibition “Imitation of Life” at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, and Metro Pictures, New York. In 2017 Sherman caused a sensation when she made her private Instagram account public. The social media platform, where users can exhibit vignettes of their daily lives and manipulate their appearance through filters, seemed made for her work, and Sherman was celebrated for her deft use of the application to make art. Her selfies, at times grotesquely distorted and at others uncomfortably enigmatic, call attention to some of Instagram’s most unnerving characteristics, namely the ambiguity between real and staged. A retrospective was organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2019.