Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman and her film stills

“Untitled film stills, together with many of Sherman’s subsequent series of the eighties, became seminal works of post-modernism. Throughout the eighties, Sherman extended the parameters of photographic art. She was commissioned in 1983 and 1984 and again in 1993 and 1994, by increasingly self-ironizing fashion industry, to make photographs which inevitably challenged notions of glamour and female sexuality” –  (Lowry, 2000, p.6)

When I look at Cindy Sherman’s film still work as a collection, I can’t help but get sense she’s completely overwhelmed by vanity. Where are these challenges to female glamour? I see these more as mimicking movie stills and serves no other purpose but to flatter the film industry and glamourize her self-image. It’s as if she’s trying to say, I am an intellectual, I am a housewife, I am a business woman, I am a librarian, I am a dancer, I am a city slicker, I am refined, I am fashionable, I am sophisticated, I am the girlfriend, I am the maid, I am the traveller, I am the loner, I am the popular, I am the hitchhiker, I am the everyday woman, I am an individual, I am sexy. I feel the film stills would have more meaning if they were everyday people made into the characters and film stars. It would show more of a connection between the movies and everybody’s lives.

“Cindy Sherman’s stills seems to anticipate the associations which her images trigger in the beholder. In some way she manages to gain control of an anonymous publics imaginary world.” – (Garrel et al, 1997, p10) 

   

“Cindy Sherman, trained as a photographer and painter, has never dwelt unduly on the content of the ‘untitled film stills’. Generally speaking, she does not profess to any artistic theories. She once said that she enjoyed dressing up as a child and continued to do so as an adult. She also discovered that dressing up helped to combat her depressions.” –  (Garrel et al, 1997, pp 11-12)

So if these are her thoughts. I can’t understand this obsession with making things into something they are not. Works of art should stand alone, dazzling and amazing. From 1986 and onwards I really enjoy her work.

Reference List

Lowry, J. (2000) The Hasselblad Award 1999 Cindy Sherman. Sweden: Hasselblad Center

Garrel, B.V., Lueken, V., Foster, H. and  Schjeldahl, P. (1997) Cindy Sherman. Holland: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam