Cindy Sherman
The photographer who plays every role.
Cindy Sherman photographs herself dressed up in hundreds of roles, from film stars to clowns. Her works explore identity and stereotypes.
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up on Long Island outside New York. As a child she loved dressing up. She studied at Buffalo State College, first painting and then photography. In Buffalo she co-founded the artist-run exhibition space Hallwalls with Robert Longo, among others.
Her breakthrough came with Untitled Film Stills of 1977–1980, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs. Each picture looks like a still from a film of the 1950s or 60s: a lone woman in a kitchen, on a city street, on a shabby hotel bed. But the films do not exist, and every woman is Sherman herself. The series shows how images of women are built from clichés we recognise. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought the entire series in 1995.
Sherman is model, make-up artist, director and photographer in her pictures, but she has said they are not self-portraits. The film stills were followed by large-format colour photographs. There are series about the fashion world, about fairy tales and disasters with rotting food and prostheses, and about art history, in which in 1988–1990 she dressed up as figures in old portraits. She has made series about clowns and about older women in high society.
Sherman belongs to the so-called Pictures Generation, American artists who around 1980 examined the images of the mass media. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Her photographs have sold for very large sums, and she has had retrospectives at the largest museums. In recent years she has also used mobile apps and social media to distort her face.
Her influence is enormous. She showed that identity is something performed, and her changes of role anticipated today’s culture of selfies and digital selves. Few contemporary artists have so clearly shaped how we view photography, gender and self-presentation.