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“Sherman has imitated and confronted assorted representational tropes, exploring the myriad ways in which women and the body are depicted by effective contemporary image makers, including the mass media and historical sources such as fairy tales, portraiture, and surrealist photography”

—Amanda Cruz)

Who is this woman?

Between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman created 69 black-and-white photographs, using herself as the principal subject, that are known as the Untitled Film Series. As you view the Museum’s acquisition from this series, Untitled Film Still #16 from 1978, what are some of the questions that Cindy Sherman asks of the viewer? First among those questions may be, Who is this woman? Is this a self-portrait of the photographer, since she is clearly the subject of the picture, or does the person shown in the work represent a type of woman, rather than any individual person? Is this woman someone we recognize? If so, from where? What does this woman say to us about other women as well as those who portray or create public images of them? Is this woman alone in her physical space, or do we as viewers occupy that space helping to create this woman’s “type” beyond the picture, in much the same way that the photograph of a male gazing upon her in the picture may imply that his gaze has something to do with the creation of her image?

Cindy Sherman’s exploration of questions such as the ones posed above in her Untitled Film Series emerged from her interest in the depiction of women in postwar publicity stills, advertising, and other popular media. Amanda Cruz has noted:

Sherman impersonated various female character types from old B movies and film noir [perhaps] to speak to a generation of baby boomer women who had grown up absorbing those glamorous images at home on their televisions, taking such portrayals as cues for their future.

Many readings of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have followed a similar vein of argument. In his review of the Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue on the Untitled Film Series, scholar and critic Arthur Danto notes:

...Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman’s strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject ... or raw material ...but a whole artistic vocabulary. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones—those 8 × 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn’t real. In the Untitled Film Series there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America—the period of Sherman’s youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology…

Amanda Cruz says of Sherman’s Untitled Film Series,

…The voyeuristic nature of these images and their filmic associations encourage a... reading of these works as illustrations of Laura Malvey’s renowned 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which describes the image of woman onscreen as the subject of the controlling male gaze and the object of masculine desire…

We, as viewers, are not intended to have a definitive answer to the question, Who is this woman? In her introduction to the Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue on her Untitled Film Series, Sherman notes that she drew her inspiration from European film stars such as Simone Signoret, Sophia Loren, and Jeanne Moreau. But, unlike the standard Hollywood still, Sherman notes: “What I was interested in was when they were almost expressionless, a rare occurrence in posed and artificial publicity shots.” This debunking of the publicity still can also be argued to carry forward in Sherman’s depersonalization of her photographic subjects, as she gives them no names beyond a number in her series, in her conscious approach to making the print quality resemble that of the older 50-cent still with its grainy, ambiguous lack of clarity, and in her uncanny acting ability which reminds us of constructions of femininity in popular media, while simultaneously deconstructing these creations with her own art.

Do you think Sherman’s photograph, Untitled Film Still #16, subverts female stereotypes or encourages them? What do you think scholars and critics with opposing views might say? What do you see in the photograph that influences your argument?

The complexity of Sherman’s artistic and social exploration with Untitled Film Series has been widely celebrated. Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and was the youngest of five children. She showed no artistic interest as a child and did not become involved with photography until she was in college at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1976. Sherman has created other photographic series such as Back Screen in 1980 and Freaks in 1986. She remains a celebrated and controversial artist today.

Sherman has been derided by some feminist scholars because they feel there is too little irony in the female typology she presents in her work, thus failing to undermine the constructed objectification of women common in publicity stills and other popular media. Whatever view one may take of Sherman’s work, few argue against Andy Warhol’s claim that “she’s good enough to be a real actress,” and that with this seminal series at the outset of her photographic career, she became a star in the world of art.

—John S. Welch

SOURCES

Cruz, Amanda, et. al. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997.

Kelly, Michael. “Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman,” in Holly and Moxey, eds., Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Sherman, Cindy and Peter Galassi. Commentary: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995-96.