Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, she plays with the norms of gender, art and photography. She came to light in the 1970s and continued to transform herself, displaying the diversity of human types and stereotypes in her images.

Her images seem to focus a lot on femininity and sexuality enhancing certain aspects of female identity.

Her work has inspired mine quite a lot, and id like to use aspects of here work in mine to show femininity.

She only photographed herself and dressed up for shoots to almost imply a masking. Through that showed empowerment and self. Which is a very strong message to show during the time, where holly-Wood was massive and everyone was watching these actors while Sherman was portraying different people in her own way.

Artist analysation –

This photo is a very famous one of Cindy’s, it represents femininity in a very different way to how it would be seen in that era. She focus’ on normalising independent and strong women through the use of photographing herself and the way she presents herself in each photo. The short hair is a main focus as woman at the time would only be ‘socially acceptable’ with long hair because that was the norm – this shows the theme of social desirability bias.

This photo shows a different side to Cindy’s work then the other photos as the use of morphing different photos together show how people may not seem comfortable showing who they are because of the social desirability bias that surrounds normality in the modern day world.