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Lot Essay
‘I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.’ (C. Sherman, quoted in G. Collins ‘A Portraitist’s Romp Through Art History’, in The New York Times, 1 February 1990).
Instantly recognisable, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series are regarded as the most influential and celebrated series of her oeuvre. As if capturing the climactic moment of a film noir, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still, #24-A, 1978, introduces a lone woman looking apprehensively into the distance, peering at a character or scene just beyond our vision. Both cannily familiar, yet impossible to identify, Sherman poses as a female protagonist from the world of cinema. Using a host of detritus acquired by the artist over many years, Sherman weaves together an elaborate persona whose identity, though familiar, is never explicit. Performing as both protagonist and director, Sherman lures the viewer into the composition, introducing a plethora of possible narratives.
The Untitled Film Stills from the late 1970s were influential in the field of photography and contemporary art for their engagement with ideas surrounding identity and constructed reality. Prompting notions of the uncanny in their strangely familiar yet undoubtedly ambiguous compositions, Sherman’s series presents the artistic self through imagery suggestive of film, television and media in a way that critiques modernist assumptions and societal constructs. And yet in a postmodern twist, the Untitled Film Stills do not exist as appropriations of ‘original’ films – they exist in the peculiar state of feeling like a copy from which no original exists. This simulcral tendency is amplified in the Untitled Film Stills through Sherman’s deft play of female stereotypes. Photographed alone, Sherman assumes various archetypal female roles that were prevalent in postwar America: the glamorous actress, the caring housewife.
Construing scenes that are evocative of 1960s and 1960s films, Sherman mined stereotypes in compellingly persuasive narratives or visual codes, drawing from a trove of filmic practices – lighting, cropping, framing, and camera angle – as well as bodily conventions – clothing, gestures, and poses. Indeed Sherman references the influence of European cinema on the creation of her art: ‘I was mostly going for the look of European as opposed to Hollywood types,’ she later explained. ‘I liked the Hitchcock look, Antonioni, Neorealist stuff. What I didn’t want were pictures showing strong emotion. It was European film stills that I’d find women who were more neutral. If the emotional quotient was too high--the photograph would seem campy’ (C. Sherman, ‘The Making of Untitled’, in The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York 2003, p. 8).
Instantly recognisable, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series are regarded as the most influential and celebrated series of her oeuvre. As if capturing the climactic moment of a film noir, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still, #24-A, 1978, introduces a lone woman looking apprehensively into the distance, peering at a character or scene just beyond our vision. Both cannily familiar, yet impossible to identify, Sherman poses as a female protagonist from the world of cinema. Using a host of detritus acquired by the artist over many years, Sherman weaves together an elaborate persona whose identity, though familiar, is never explicit. Performing as both protagonist and director, Sherman lures the viewer into the composition, introducing a plethora of possible narratives.
The Untitled Film Stills from the late 1970s were influential in the field of photography and contemporary art for their engagement with ideas surrounding identity and constructed reality. Prompting notions of the uncanny in their strangely familiar yet undoubtedly ambiguous compositions, Sherman’s series presents the artistic self through imagery suggestive of film, television and media in a way that critiques modernist assumptions and societal constructs. And yet in a postmodern twist, the Untitled Film Stills do not exist as appropriations of ‘original’ films – they exist in the peculiar state of feeling like a copy from which no original exists. This simulcral tendency is amplified in the Untitled Film Stills through Sherman’s deft play of female stereotypes. Photographed alone, Sherman assumes various archetypal female roles that were prevalent in postwar America: the glamorous actress, the caring housewife.
Construing scenes that are evocative of 1960s and 1960s films, Sherman mined stereotypes in compellingly persuasive narratives or visual codes, drawing from a trove of filmic practices – lighting, cropping, framing, and camera angle – as well as bodily conventions – clothing, gestures, and poses. Indeed Sherman references the influence of European cinema on the creation of her art: ‘I was mostly going for the look of European as opposed to Hollywood types,’ she later explained. ‘I liked the Hitchcock look, Antonioni, Neorealist stuff. What I didn’t want were pictures showing strong emotion. It was European film stills that I’d find women who were more neutral. If the emotional quotient was too high--the photograph would seem campy’ (C. Sherman, ‘The Making of Untitled’, in The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York 2003, p. 8).