Gelatin silver print
70.2 x 89.9 cm


Cindy Sherman has combined the roles of director, photographer, and actor to photograph herself in a variety of personas and guises, which explore and expose cultural stereotyping. More than self-portraiture, in these works Sherman addresses issues of gender identity, voyeurism, and representational power systems, and examines the role of art in perpetuating or commenting on these issues. Sherman began Untitled Film Stills when she was 23 years old. The first series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs take as their subject female characters and scenarios of 1950s and ’60s Hollywood B movies. Using makeup, wigs, costumes, and props, Sherman impersonates generic types of fictionalized femininity. They are instantly recognizable, as constructed as the settings they inhabit. Always alone, they appear caught in a suspended, often introspective moment. As characters they have no interiority; they are instruments of mass-media fiction. Lured into the drama, we project onto their surfaces our own interpretations and narratives. The ambiguity and elusiveness of their meaning is one of the strengths of the photographs. They are in many ways about thwarted desire: fragments of an unknown whole, stills without a film.
–Soraya Rodriguez

*1954 in Glen Ridge, USA | Living and working in New York, USA