Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

by Cindy Sherman, Amada Cruz, Elizabeth A. T. Smith

American artist Cindy Sherman creates staged and manipulated photographs that draw on popular culture and art history to explore female identity. Her art embodies two developments in the art world: the impact of postmodern theory on art practice; and the rise of photography and mass-media techniques as modes of artistic expression. This volume, published on the occasion of an international touring exhibition, presents over 200 images from the breadth of Sherman's work, from the "Untitled Film Stills" of the 1970s to series such as "Centerfolds", "Fashion", "Disasters", "Fairy Tales" and "History Portraits". Essayists Cruz, Jones and Smith offer insights into Sherman's art from several vantage points, positioning it within the trajectory of feminist art history and revealing her influence since the 1970s.

Genres: Art, Photography, Nonfiction, Feminism, Contemporary

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

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

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I looked at it and bought it at the strand when I was feeling particularly cool one day. And then my cat walked across the book going mew mew mew.

[Jiaying · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learnt about Cindy Sherman during my A-Level days as part of Art theory. She's another one of my inspirational artists cum (portrait) photographer alongside British painter Jenny Saville. One is confronted with various styles throughout her years of oeuvre, yet one thing that stays consistent is the desire to bring up issues relating to the male gaze through using herself as the subject matter. By setting up scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood Era, it brings to mind the fluidity of the female identity - that is it truly confined to one specific persona or is it due to other factors like control & coercion for instance. The performative style in Sherman's pictures thus makes one re-look & re-think about the underlying power dynamics of that era.

Few of my Sherman's most impactful series was 1990s "Sex Pictures" & the "Untitled Film Stills" of 1960s. "Sex Pictures" was few revolutionary series of hers as Sherman sought to use mannequins or dolls lacking in personality whilst styling them in a grotesque manner. Even more so significant when it's the use of medical dolls or even prosthetics. For "Untitled Film Stills", just by re-enacting scenes & characters; images that are already culturally embedded in Hollywood films, it ironically makes the images even more sinister too, as if there is more to what's on the surface. A silent, piercing statement.

Glad to have my hands on this retrospective book as I got to read some of Sherman's thought processes behind her set-ups. While her works can be controversial to some viewers, nonetheless it has been integral in bringing to light the untamed side of humanity, forcing us to confront the non-grandiose versions of beauty, (female) identity.

[Kandace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cindy Sherman has made some freaky images. I mostly enjoyed the various series she’s made brought together in this one large retrospective exhibit (which toured in the late 1990s). The book begins with three critical essays about her work which delve deeper into the inspirations of her work - Hollywood glam, horror, and the budding (white) feminist approach to exploring the white female body. None of the three scholars engaging her work really explored how this is about woman-ness and femininity of a particularity (white, able-bodies, cis to name a few) but instead chose to read her work as a generalizable body of work about femininity and women’s sexuality at large. From my Xicanx point of view this is a real loss. The majority of the text consists of plates from her photography. Lots to see, lots to learn from. I was most intrigued with the notes the editors included from the artist herself, as a process-phile I eagerly absorbed her critical questions to herself in her idea mapping and execution. It’s beautiful to see a behind the scenes especially for some of her series that explicitly engage with notions of sex, the body, the gaze. Seeing what she directly hopes to manifest from written idea to final image inspired.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

ABSOLUTELY UNPLEASANT. There were sentences in this book so long-winded and contrived that I called people up to read aloud the ridiculousness.

I did not like the pics she took
I did not like them in a book
I did not like the essays, either
I would never want to be her
I did not like this, not at all
Not in spring and not in fall.

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

cindy sherman is my FAVORITE photographer. hands down. the book has some of her notes and a lot of narrative, in addition to some of her work. i think in order to appreciate the book, you would already have to be interested in Sherman's work.

[Rachel Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cindy Sherman is a national treasure.

[Ray Dunsmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cindy Sherman's oeuvre can be described as a long exploration and deconstruction of the image of the self - what the personality really means, whether we're our own people or just an accumulation of signs, images and gestures gleaned from all around us. But even that description does her work a bit of a disservice. As she develops as an artist, her work turns from a deconstruction into a thorough, savage dismantling of the self-image, like prying apart the societal definitions of womanhood to see how they work, then sticking them back together in the wrong order to see what happens. There's also the constant undercurrent of dread that seems to permeate Sherman's portraits. The famous Untitled Film Stills series relishes in placing a Girl™ into a vague Situation™ and letting the viewer piece together what she's doing there, why, and what could possibly happen next. Over time, Sherman really learned to embrace the bizarre in her work, to lean into the artificial theatricality of the staged portrait so far that she begins to plumb the uncanny valley long before she starts to phase out pictures of herself in favor of mutilated medical dolls. Her Centerfolds, a rejected Artforum contribution, begin to hit those notes of terror a bit more strongly, portraying more vulnerable women in more ambiguously tense situations that invite anxieties of what lies beyond the edge of the frame. Then, she dives straight into the deep end with the Disaster/Fairy Tale photos, going full-bore into vivid, viscerally disturbing fever dream scenes that mine veins of body horror and treat the uncanny valley like a carnival ground. She brings out more and more obviously fake props and places them before the viewer as if there's nothing to see here, an obvious lie set up like it should be taken at face value but impossible to take as real. Her History Portraits really spell out this message, highlighting the artificiality of the historical art portrait - especially in her use of phony latex bald caps and exaggerated false breasts to showcase the often-bizarre anatomy of medieval artists. Her medical doll Sex images go even further, dismantling the concept of pornography until it's reduced to surrealistic nightmares of lust, rubber bodies made for carnal hedonism with artificial passion and terrifyingly unreadable intentions. Sherman's work exists to posit one very large question that never really leaves your mind - where do the images that make up your self come from? What parts of you are completely you and what parts were tacked on by others? Is there even really a way to find a true self without outside influence? Do you see the world as it really is or do you see it the way it's shown to you? It's work that pulls the curtain back on the artificiality of image itself and once that switch gets flipped, there's really no going back. Fantastically thought-provoking work.

[Heddy Van Dijk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cindy Sherman is truly amazing, it is almost difficult to describe what one feels when exploring her beautiful photographs and the juxtaposition of the environments and the rare exploration she makes of reality, of other people and of herself. Many have taken Cindy's work as a starting point and done similar things, such as Yasumasa Morimura and others considered in the "appropriationist" movement. Not only is the way in which Sherman makes these realities that are not hers her own peculiar, but also the quality of the materials she uses to construct her scenes, in addition to her, of course, incredible technical abilities as a photographer, is of exquisite quality. Particularly, regarding this retrospective, I really like the selection of photos, I think they were well chosen, it is a very interesting and lively period of Sherman, however, I think the book physically deserved a more robust format, more durable, that is why I consider 4 stars is the right thing to express a good point of view about this book, for those who are thinking or deciding whether it will be a good idea to add it to their collection or to buy it.

[Emily Casella · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mary Anne Doane reworked Joan Riviere's 1929 theory of feminine masquerade in an important 1982 essay, 'Film and the Masquerade', writing '[t]he masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness...as..imagistic." (page 35).

From Cindy's notes on page 180 from 10/5/94. "I don't want to be purely decorative + make pretty, odd images. If anything, that would be my criticism of much of the old surrealist stuff. It is really about esthetics, which at that time was groundbreaking in itself, but now looks merely beautiful +stylish. Whenever there is a female figure, she's still always beautiful. It was such a macho movement yet even the women artists grolified htier fellow female forms." (page 180)

[Keith Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not to my taste at all. Some of the sexual photos with mannequins are technically clever but show an unhealthy fixation with the macabre. Interestingly, the author of the book draws a comparison between Sherman's work and the later etchings of Francisco Goya, which is not necessarily a compliment in that he was suffering from lead-induced dementia when he drew them.
And the self-portraits from movie stills just leave me cold.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that is more an art book with pictures. The long beginning is dry, but the book is beautiful and shows the breath of her work.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spent a nice lazy lockdown Sunday re-reading this and pouring over the images. Those early Untitled Film Stills are so evocative.

[Juliet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love her project, which is to put herself in all sorts of different scenarios and change her appearance using wigs, make-up, clothing, until she is unrecognizable to herself, and photographing herself in various settings suitable to her made-up persona. The closest visual art I've seen of what it's like to write fiction. Tons and tons of photographs, some that are disturbing, some that I could stare at for hours.

[John Millard · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was between marriages I visited a friend in Chicago (circa 1998) and she took me to this retrospective. I loved it and for the first time in many tears felt like I was enjoying something for myself.

[daniel jasiak · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read all the Time !!!

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yikes!!

[Christalla Ta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. My favourite artist from a young age.

[John Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cindy Sherman 😳