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Lot Essay
Cindy Sherman’s career has been characterized by the artist’s deft ability to transform herself into the full spectrum of female stereotypes; her photographs holding up a mirror to reflect the social roles and gender expectations pervasive in film and advertising images. She first gained the attention of critics for her iconic Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), small-scale, black-and-white photographs in which she played out the narrative tropes and archetypal characters of classic Hollywood films. Art critic Barry Schwabsky has declared “Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80),... [are] undoubtedly the best-known images here, and deservedly so, for familiarity has not extinguished their complexity or freshness. In Sherman’s pictures it is not the photograph itself so much as its subject—who in turn partakes of the image-reality—who is at once always identical and always different. Sherman reappears in endless, anonymous walk-on roles—the girl waiting for a ride on the lonely roadside, the scuba diver, the sexy babe staring out the window waiting for someone who may never come, and so on. Each of Sherman’s reappearances in these photographs seems to be as someone whom we’ve seen before and whom we will certainly see again, more or less, in some other B-movie. Yet if each is a stereotype, it’s one we get too brief a glimpse of to be able to put a definite name to” (B. Schwabsky, “A Million Little Pictures: Art of the Pictures Generation,” The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present, New York, 2016, n.p.).
Untitled Film Stills #47 is one of three photographs in the series that the artist didn’t take herself. Often, the trail of the shutter release cord attached to Sherman’s camera that allowed her to photograph herself is visible somewhere in the scene. Here, Sherman, or rather the woman she is playing, seems to be caught off guard while watering her lawn. Both hands grip the water hose—a stand in for the shutter release cord. Wearing a sun hat, sunglasses, and a short white robe, she stands in a backyard enclosed by a wooden fence and the dense foliage of tall trees. In the catalogue for Sherman’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the artist recalls handing her niece the camera to photograph her while she lounged by her sister’s pool.
The woman in Untitled Film Still #52, on the other hand has been photographed while caught up in her own private moment. She lies across a bed with her head on a floral pillow; wearing a negligée and with long, flowing blonde hair, and appears lost in thought, reminiscent of a film noir starlet in a moment of wistfulness or despair. The subtle mood of #52 is typical of the Untitled Film Stills, which do not rely on histrionics for their effect. Sherman instead presents moments that are void of obvious meaning, which leave the viewer to complete the work with significances that they impart themselves from the wider world of constructed imagery and emotion. “In a lot of movie photos the actors look cute, impish, alluring, distraught, frightened, tough, etc., but what I was interested in was when they were almost expressionless. Which was rare to see; in film stills there’s a lot of overacting because they’re trying to sell the movie” (C. Sherman, The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York 2003, p. 8). Such ambiguity is key to her coolly evocative dramas of the gaze. For all its artifice, the work creates an eerie sensation of mystery at the heart of our ways of seeing: Sherman stares off-camera, into the unknown, and sets the tone for the project that would follow the Untitled Film Stills. The Centerfolds of the early 1980s are tense psychological portraits of vulnerable women at ambiguous moments.
Untitled Film Stills #47 is one of three photographs in the series that the artist didn’t take herself. Often, the trail of the shutter release cord attached to Sherman’s camera that allowed her to photograph herself is visible somewhere in the scene. Here, Sherman, or rather the woman she is playing, seems to be caught off guard while watering her lawn. Both hands grip the water hose—a stand in for the shutter release cord. Wearing a sun hat, sunglasses, and a short white robe, she stands in a backyard enclosed by a wooden fence and the dense foliage of tall trees. In the catalogue for Sherman’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the artist recalls handing her niece the camera to photograph her while she lounged by her sister’s pool.
The woman in Untitled Film Still #52, on the other hand has been photographed while caught up in her own private moment. She lies across a bed with her head on a floral pillow; wearing a negligée and with long, flowing blonde hair, and appears lost in thought, reminiscent of a film noir starlet in a moment of wistfulness or despair. The subtle mood of #52 is typical of the Untitled Film Stills, which do not rely on histrionics for their effect. Sherman instead presents moments that are void of obvious meaning, which leave the viewer to complete the work with significances that they impart themselves from the wider world of constructed imagery and emotion. “In a lot of movie photos the actors look cute, impish, alluring, distraught, frightened, tough, etc., but what I was interested in was when they were almost expressionless. Which was rare to see; in film stills there’s a lot of overacting because they’re trying to sell the movie” (C. Sherman, The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York 2003, p. 8). Such ambiguity is key to her coolly evocative dramas of the gaze. For all its artifice, the work creates an eerie sensation of mystery at the heart of our ways of seeing: Sherman stares off-camera, into the unknown, and sets the tone for the project that would follow the Untitled Film Stills. The Centerfolds of the early 1980s are tense psychological portraits of vulnerable women at ambiguous moments.