Fitcher's Bird

by Cindy Sherman

A famous American fine arts photographer creates strange images to match her retelling of a tale from the Brothers Grimm, which features a wicked wizard named Fitcher who, disguised as a beggar, steals beautiful girls.

Genres: Folklore

32 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1983

About the author

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and filmmaker whose self-portraits offer critiques of gender and identity. What made Sherman famous is the use of her own body in roles or personas in her work, with her seminal series Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) being particularly important. These black-and-white photographs feature the artist herself as a model in various costumes and poses, and are her portrayals of female stereotypes found in film, television, and advertising. Similar to Barbara Kruger, Sherman examines and distorts femininity as a social construct.“I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you're looking at is something totally opposite,” she reflected. “It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side.”

Born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ, the artist abandoned painting for photography while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in 1976, moved to New York to pursue a career as a photographer. In addition to the Untitled Film Stills series, she has continued to explore women as subject matter, often donning elaborate disguises in large-scale color photographs, throughout her career. While her practice has grouped her with the Pictures Generation, along with artists such as Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo, her distinctive blend of performance and photography stands alone. Her work has been the subject of many museum exhibitions, including those at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019, and at the National Portrait Gallery, in London in 2019. Sherman lives and works in New York, NY.

Reviews

[Steve Ellerhoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Any fairytale where a cruel, murderous husband goes on to his wife about all the great things he's given her (marriage, house, children, education, a flippin' chocolate fountain fondu machine, whatever), that dude has to end up burnt to a crisp by his wife and her sisters. Just sayin'. And the real-life fairytale where that happens is "Fitcher's Bird." Collected by the Brothers Grimm, it shares a lot of thematic and plot details with the better-known story "Bluebeard" -- mainly the whole "never open this one room ('cause it's fulla his victims)" motif. I read these stories as warnings about possessive, dangerous men who are very charming to others and deadly to the women they marry. A sort of old-timey folk wisdom alerting one to the red flags to pay close attention to -- and who to go to for help (your family) if trapped by one of these creeps.

This particular edition is laid out with photos by the great Cindy Sherman. I love her art so much, having stumbled into an exhibition of it when I was visiting Zurich in 2014. That exhibition totally blew my mind. So I was thrilled to find that she did this book in 1992. The figures in the photos are sculpted, not her famous self-portraits. But I like it. The lighting is vivid. And several of the photos really are striking. I have two favorites. One shows the skull the youngest sister decorates with flowers and jewels and puts up in a window to make Fitcher think she's watching him. The other is after she has covered herself in honey and feathers to disguise herself and one of Fitcher's birds; the framing is only of her thighs up to her midriff, with her hands held out in front of her hips. Sherman backlit the shot, so the feathers have a sort of morning-light corona around her sides and her thigh-gap between her legs. Such an effective shot! It's worth pondering over a lot, raising so many ideas about the character's power and the sharpness of her intelligence in conceiving of such a disguise and pulling it off. Fitcher just doesn't stand a chance against this sister. Love it.