Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. For four decades, Cindy has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography.

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills comprises of over seventy black and white photographs made between 1977 and 1980.  When thinking about this series, some aspects of her entire body of work immediately come to mind: disguise and theatricality, mystery and voyeurism, melancholy and vulnerability. The artist initially started these series in her apartment, using her own interior as setting for the scenes. Her subject links very closely to ours, as she recreated typical movie scenes of a woman. Her film stills allowed the audience to imagine and make up scenarios and stories from a simple photograph.  The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works.

“Each individual image creates a distinguished scene. Untitled Film Still #21 for example, reminds of a scene from an outdated television show or movie, with the woman in the picture as leading heroine, wearing a vintage 1950s outfit and looking captivated by something outside the frame. This creates suspense: we will never know what happens across the street from this woman. It makes the image not so much about what is happening in the picture, but more about what happened before and after the moment it was shot. This narrative element is characteristic of Untitled Film Stills. The scenes are recognisable as film stills – imitating typical cinematic angles, lighting, and dramatisation – but they come from no particular movie.” – Josephine Van de Walle.

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In the time period that these photographs were taken, the second wave of feminism was ongoing and women were protesting for their employment rights- above, you can see Cindy posing as a woman in the kitchen in image 1 and 8 representing the typical housewife- however in image 1 she is wearing a male blazer, perhaps hinting at the fact that this is not where all women belonged. During this wave of feminism we come across a phrase called the ‘Male Gaze’ which means: ‘the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer’. This is represented in image 6- Cindy is posing as a woman in her nightdress, showing her body with her face partially covered which potentially represents how women were objectified in movies of the past and often even in the present.