Cindy Sherman

Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has sought to raise challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art. Her photographs include some of the most expensive photographs ever sold. Sherman lives and works in New York.
While in college she also met Robert Longo, who encouraged her to record her process of "dolling up" for parties.
Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and model.^[8

Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist^{[citation needed]}, 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."^[9]

In her work, Sherman is both revealed and hidden, named yet nameless.^{[editorializing]} 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."^[10] She describes her process as intuitive, and that she responds to elements of a setting such as light, mood, location, and costume, and will continue to change external elements until she finds what she wants. She has said of her process, "I think of becoming a different person. I look into a mirror next to the camera…it’s trance-like. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens...When I see what I want, my intuition takes over—both in the 'acting' and in the editing. Seeing that other person that’s up there, that’s what I want. It’s like magic.”^[4]

Sex Pictures[edit]

Cindy Sherman uses prosthetic limbs and mannequins to create her Sex Pictures series (1992). Sherman is revealing the objectification of women through the mannequin’s positions (open legs and visible vaginas) but is also implementing a male aspect by assembling the mannequins with either androgynous or unambiguous male heads. The mannequins’ within the series appear passive and mirror a pornographic photo. Sherman is clearly commenting on gender roles within society as she consciously removed herself from this series to evoke greater dialogue than her earlier works. It is truly surprising that Sherman has omitted herself as the subject in this series (in comparison to her earlier work). However, It is apparent that Sherman’s series Sex Pictureshas been alienated from journals and articles written by well-respected art critics.

Hal Foster, an American art critic describes Sherman’s Sex Pictures in his article Obscene, Abject, Traumatic as “[i]n this scheme of things the impulse to erode the subject and to tear at the screen has driven Sherman […] to her recent work, where it is obliterated by the gaze.” ^[19] Moreover, Abigail Solomon- Godeau, a photo critic who teaches art history at the University of California illustrates Sherman’s work in Suitable for Framing: The Critical Recasting of Cindy Sherman. Solomon-Godeau writes, “[Sherman's] pictures have struck many viewers as centrally concerned with the problematics of femininity (as role, as image, as spectacle), more recent interpretation now finds them redolent with allusion to “our common humanity,” revealing “a progression through the deserts of human condition.” ^[20]

However, it is Jerry Saltz, an art critic who told New York magazine that Sherman’s work is “[f]ashioned from dismembered and recombined mannequins, some adorned with pubic hair, one posed with a tampon in vagina, another with sausages being excreted from vulva, this was anti-porn porn, the unsexiest sex pictures ever made, visions of feigning, fighting, perversion. … Today, I think of Cindy Sherman as an artist who only gets better.” ^[21] Saltz’s commentary gives life to Sherman’s mannequins who were presented as a symbolic declaration of the objectification of women within a man’s world.

Finally, Greg Fallis of Utata Tribal Photography describes Sherman’s Sex Pictures series and her work as the following,"[t]he progression of her work reflects more than a progression of ideology. It also demonstrates a progression in approach. Sherman’s initial photographs used relatively few props—just clothing. As her photographs became more sophisticated, so did her props. During her Centerfold series, she began to incorporate prosthetic body part culled from the pages of medical educational catalogs. Each new series tended to utilize more prosthetics and less of Sherman herself. By the time she began the Sex Pictures series, the photographs were exclusively of prosthetic body parts. With her Sex Pictures Sherman posed medical prostheses in sexualized positions, recreating—and strangely modifying—pornography. They are a comment on the intersection of art and taste, they are a comment on pornography and the way porn objectifies the men and women who pose for it, they are a comment on social discomfort with overt sexuality, and they are a comment on the relationship between sex and violence. Yet the emphasis is still on creating a striking image that seems simultaneously familiar and strange." Utata's Sunday Salon ^[22]

Recent projects[edit]

Between 1989 and 1990, Sherman made 35 large, color photographs restaging the settings of various European portrait paintings of the fifteenth through early 19th centuries. Under the titleHistory Portraits Sherman photographed herself in costumes flanked with props and prosthetics portraying famous artistic figures of the past, like Raphael’s La Fornarina, Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus and Judith Beheading Holofernes, or Jean Fouquet’s Madonna of Melun.^[23][24] Between 2003 and 2004, she produced the Clowns cycle, where the use of digital photography enabled her to create chromatically garish backdrops and montages of numerous characters. Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters in Sherman’s 2008 untitledSociety Portraits are not based on specific women, but the artist has made them look entirely familiar in their struggle with the standards of beauty that prevail in a youth- and status-obsessed culture. Her MoMA exhibition in 2012 also premiered a created photographic mural (2010–11) that represents the artist's first foray into transforming space through site-specific fictive environments. In the mural, Sherman transforms her face digitally, exaggerating her features through Photoshop by elongating her nose, narrowing her eyes, or creating smaller lips.^[25] Based on an insert Sherman did for Dasha Zhukova's Garage magazine using vintage clothes from Chanel’s archive, a more recent series of large-scale pictures from 2012 depict outsized enigmatic female figures standing in striking isolation before ominous painterly landscapes the artist had photographed in Iceland during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and on the isle of Capri.^[26]