Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collection Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies).
Early life and education Sherman was born in 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of the five children of Dorothy and Charles Sherman.Genocchio, Benjamin. "Art Review; Portraits of the Artist as an Actor", The New York Times, April 4, 2004; accessed May 21, 2012. "Ms. Sherman was born in Glen Ridge; when she was 3, her family moved to Huntington Beach on Long Island." Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island. Her father worked as an engineer for Grumman Aircraft.Carol Vogel (February 16, 2012), 'Cindy Sherman Unmasked", nytimes.com; accessed March 7, 2015. Her mother taught reading to children with learning difficulties.Simon Hattenstone (January 15, 2011), Sherman: Me, myself and I The Guardian. Sherman has described her mother as good to a fault, and her father as strict and cruel. She was raised Episcopalian.
In 1972, Sherman enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State University, where she majored in painting. During this time, she began to explore the ideas which became a hallmark of her work: She dressed herself as different characters, cobbled together from thrift-store clothing. Frustrated with what she saw as the limitations of painting as a medium of art, she abandoned it and took up photography. "[T]here was nothing more to say [through painting]", she 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." Sherman has said about this time:
"One of the reasons I started photographing myself was that supposedly in the spring one of my teachers would take the class out to a place near Buffalo where there were waterfalls and everybody romps around without clothes on and takes pictures of each other. I thought, 'Oh, I don't want to do this. But if we're going to have to go to the woods I better deal with it early.' Luckily we never had to do that." She spent the remainder of her college education focused on photography. Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credited with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms. At college she met Robert Longo, a fellow artist who encouraged her to record her process of "dolling up" for parties.Michael Small (November 30, 1987), Photographer Cindy Sherman Shoots Her Best Model—Herself People. This was the beginning of her Untitled Film Stills series.
In 1974, together with Longo, Charles Clough and Nancy Dwyer, she created Hallwalls, an arts center intended as a space that would accommodate artists from diverse backgrounds. Sherman was also exposed to the contemporary art exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the two Buffalo campuses of the SUNY school system, Media Studies Buffalo, and the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts, and Artpark, in nearby Lewiston, N.Y.G. Roger Denson (March 5, 2012), Cindy Sherman as Orson Welles... as John Ford... as Vittorio De Sica... as Alfred Hitchcock..., Huffington Post; accessed February 24, 2015.
It was in Buffalo that Sherman encountered the photo-based conceptual works of artists Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper.Roberta Smith (February 23, 2012), "Photography's Angel Provocateur – 'Cindy Sherman' at Museum of Modern Art", nytimes.com; accessed March 7, 2015. Along with artists like Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, and Barbara Kruger, Sherman is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.Douglas Eklund, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The Pictures Generation, metmuseum.org; accessed March 7, 2015. She graduated with a BA in 1976.
Photography 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.
Early work Bus Riders (1976–2000) is a series of photographs that feature the artist as a variety of meticulously observed characters. The photographs were shot in 1976 for the Bus Authority for display on a bus. Sherman used costumes and make-up, including blackface, to transform her identity for each image, and the cutout characters were lined up along the bus's advertising strip. Some critiques say that this work showed insensitivity to race through the use of blackface makeup while others state that it was rather with the intention of exposing racism embedded in society. The American theatre critic Margo Jefferson has written, "[The African-American figures] all have nearly the same features, too, while Ms. Sherman is able to give the white characters she impersonates a real range of skin tones and facial features. This didn't look like irony to me. It looked like a stale visual myth that was still in good working order."
Other early works involved cutout figures, such as the Murder Mystery and Play of Selves.
In her landmark photograph series Untitled Film Stills, (1977–80), Sherman appears as B movie and film noir actresses. When asked if she considers herself to be acting in her photographs, Sherman said, "I never thought I was acting. When I became involved with close-ups I needed more information in the expression. I couldn't depend on background or atmosphere. I wanted the story to come from the face. Somehow the acting just happened."
Many of Sherman's photo series, like the 1981 Centerfolds, call attention to stereotypes of women in society, films, television and magazines. When talking about one of her centerfold pictures Sherman 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... Obviously I'm trying to make someone feel bad for having a certain expectation".
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." 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."
Untitled Film Stills The series Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), with which Cindy Sherman achieved international recognition, consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. The artist poses in different roles (librarians, hillbillies, and seductresses), and settings (streets, yards, pools, beaches, and interiors),Lance Esplund (February 27, 2012), Cindy Sherman Self-Portraits Offer Empty Entertainment: Review Bloomberg. producing a result reminiscent of stills typical of Italian neorealism or American film noir of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Sherman avoided putting titles on the images in order to preserve their ambiguity.Victoria Olsen (March 2009), Cindy Sherman: Monument Valley Girl Smithsonian Magazine. She would often pose her heroines as alone, expressionless, and in private. An overarching characteristic of her heroines were those that did not follow conventional ideas of marriage and family; they were rebellious women who either died as that or who were later tamed by society. In this series, the gaze seems to come from another subject – "usually a man" – to highlight the concept of the male gaze.
Modest in scale compared to Sherman's later cibachrome photographs, they are all 8 1/2 by 11 inches, each displayed in identical, simple black frames.Helen Molesworth, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills twenty years later Frieze Magazine, Issue 36, September–October 1997. 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). The next group was taken in 1978 at Robert Longo's family beach house on the north fork of Long Island. (Sherman met Longo in 1976 and began a relationship with him) 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 road trip to Arizona with her parents. Untitled Film Still#48 (1979), also known as The Hitchhiker, was shot by Sherman's fatherSimon Schama (February 3, 2012), Cindy Sherman talks to Simon Schama Financial Times. 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.Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, June 26-September 2, 1997 MoMA.
The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan purchased the series for an estimated $1 million in 1995.Barry Schwabsky (April 18, 1999), A Photographer's Many Faces The New York Times; accessed February 24, 2015.
Untitled Film Still #21 was listed as one of the 100 influential photographs by TIME Magazine.
1980s 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, were shown for the first time at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City.
It was with her series Rear Screen Projections, 1980, that Sherman switched from black-and-white to color and to clearly larger formats. Centerfolds/Horizontals, 1981, are inspired by the center spreads in fashion and pornographic magazines. The twelve (24 by 48 inches) photographs were initially commissioned — but not used — by Artforum's Editor in Chief Ingrid Sischy for an artist's section in the magazine.Grace Glueck (May 23, 2003), Cindy Sherman – 'Centerfolds, 1981', nytimes.com, May 23, 2003. She poses either on the floor or in bed, usually recumbent and often supine.Andy Grundberg (November 22, 1981), "Cindy Sherman: A Playful and Political Post-Modernist", nytimes.com, November 22, 1981; accessed February 24, 2015. About her aims with the self-portraits, Sherman has said: "Some of them I'd hope would seem very psychological. While I'm working I might feel as tormented as the person I'm portraying."
In 1982, Sherman began her Pink Robes series which includes Untitled #97, #98, #99 and #100.