Cindy Sherman

The Sherman family moved to Huntington, on Long Island, soon after their fifth child was born in New Jersey. Her father engineered aircraft for Grumman. Her mother taught reading to children who could not manage it. She enrolled at Buffalo State in 1972 to study painting and failed the required photography course as a freshman. She took it again with Barbara Jo Revelle, who introduced her to conceptual art, and painting stopped making sense. She had been meticulously copying other art, she said, and realized she could use a camera and put the time into an idea instead. In 1974 she and three fellow students founded Hallwalls, an artists' space in Buffalo. She graduated in 1976 and went to New York, where she answered the phone at Artists Space.

Between 1977 and 1980 Sherman made 69 black-and-white photographs of a woman who is unmistakably in a film — a film that does not exist. The Untitled Film Stills take the shape of the studio publicity frame, an image manufactured to imply a whole plot, and hang it on no plot at all. They are counterfeit evidence of movies nobody shot. She worked alone, mostly in her own apartment and clothes, as model, photographer, stylist, make-up artist and director at once. She has said plainly they are not self-portraits. She plays types. She never sees herself in them.

Critics read the work as feminist argument almost at once. Douglas Crimp, writing in October, called it a hybrid of photography and performance that reveals femininity to be an effect of representation. Laura Mulvey, who had named the male gaze, found in it a parody of the ways a camera looks at women. Sherman has spent decades declining to confirm any of it. She works intuitively, she says, staring into a mirror beside the camera until the character arrives, and the theories were simply not in her head in 1977. She hopes the pictures are seen as feminist, she has said, but she will not argue feminist theory for them. Some critics hear evasion in that, or false modesty about a deliberate critique. Others take it as the point.

The work got harder to look at as it went on: the 1981 centerfolds, shot supine and framed to catch the viewer looking, then fairy tales and disasters built from prostheses and mannequins, 35 history portraits restaging European painting, sex pictures assembled from medical dummies, the clowns, the society portraits of rich women losing to their own faces. Meanwhile the early pictures became assets. MoMA bought the complete Untitled Film Stills in 1995 for a reported 1 million dollars. In 2011 a print of Untitled #96, one of the centerfolds, sold at Christie's for 3.89 million dollars, the most ever paid for a photograph, for work made cheaply in her own apartment about the commodity value of images of women.

Cindy Sherman's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Untitled Film Stills artwork
  69 black-and-white photographs made through 1980, in identical black frames 1977
• Centerfolds artwork
  Twelve large horizontal photographs commissioned by Artforum and then not run 1981
• Fairy Tales artwork
  Prostheses and mannequins enter the work for the first time 1985
• History Portraits artwork
  35 large color photographs restaging European portrait painting 1990
• Sex Pictures artwork
  Medical dummies and prosthetic limbs, with Sherman out of the frame 1992
• Society Portraits artwork
  Wealthy older women, digitally aged rather than smoothed 2008

• January 19, 1954 aged 0 Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of five children The family moved to Huntington, on Long Island, while she was small.
• 1972 aged ~18 Enrolls at Buffalo State to study painting and fails the required photography course She repeated it with Barbara Jo Revelle, who introduced her to conceptual art.
• 1974 aged ~20 Co-founds Hallwalls in Buffalo with Robert Longo, Charles Clough and Nancy Dwyer
• 1976 aged ~22 Graduates with a BA and shoots Bus Riders, a series she did not show for years Later criticized for its use of blackface. Margo Jefferson wrote that the Black characters all carried nearly the same features while the white ones did not.
• 1977 aged ~23 Begins the Untitled Film Stills Shot largely in her own apartment. Untitled Film Still #48 was taken by her father on a road trip to Arizona.
• 1980 aged ~26 Metro Pictures opens with her photographs as its first show Her first New York solo exhibition came earlier the same year at The Kitchen.
• 1995 aged ~41 MoMA buys the complete Untitled Film Stills and she receives a MacArthur Fellowship The museum paid a reported 1 million dollars.
• 2011 aged ~57 A print of Untitled #96 sells at Christie's for 3.89 million dollars The highest price paid at auction for a photograph at that time.
• 2012 aged ~58 MoMA mounts a retrospective of more than 170 photographs It travelled to SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center. A second retrospective opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2019.

• Diane Arbus 1923–1971
  Photographer whose square-format portraits remade American documentary photography photographic predecessor
• Richard Avedon 1923–2004
  Put movement into fashion photography, then stripped his subjects bare against white paper. photographic predecessor
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. worked the same borrowed imagery