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Lot Essay
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills are among the most evocative and iconic images of the 1970s and 1980s. Here, a young career girl appears to be searching the streets of New York City for a job, or is she in fact an actress playing a young career girl searching the streets of New York for a job? The success of Untitled Film Still #21 lies in the ambiguity that exists between these possibilities. In fact, in reality neither scenario is strictly true; the photograph is a self-portrait constructed by Sherman to examine the modern cultural depictions of women in the mass media. The artist is portrayed as a nervous, new arrival searching her surroundings with its domineering, slightly sinister tall buildings looming up behind her. The bow-topped woven hat above tidy curls and starched white collar spread across a tweed jacket suggest a job hunt or a journey to work but the wary, side-eyed look suggests her focus lies on a tense encounter happening outside of the frame. Yet, for all the deliberation and intention that took place to construct the image, Sherman herself gives no indication that she is aware that the photograph is being taken, so absorbed in the character is she.
Sherman recalls her intention for the Untitled Film Stills, and in particular a selection that features the same blonde woman with close-cropped curls that can be seen here, in #21. “At first I wanted to do a group of imaginary stills all from the same actress’s career, so in those first six photographs the hair doesn’t change all that much—I think I made her a blond because that seemed very actress-y and perhaps because I still had brown hair… I tried to make her look older in some, more of an ingénue in others, and older-trying-hard-to-look-younger in others. I didn’t think about what each movie was about, I focused on the different ages and looks of the same character” (C. Sherman, Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York, 2003, p. 8).
Since the late 1970s Sherman has scoured the American cultural unconscious, plucking images, symbols, and archetypes to investigate. Her intuitive, associative, playful, and subversive approach has redefined the medium of photography from a conversation about capturing moments on film, to a conceptually driven, performative approach that uses the camera as one tool among many used to construct an image. Sherman’s mind contains an endless catalogue of film and advertising images spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, from which she plucks images to become the basis of her photographs. These early works are hauntingly familiar of American film-noir, like those made by the great director Alfred Hitchcock, yet one can never quite pinpoint a particular film or actress being portrayed. “I liked the Hitchcock look, Antonioni, Neorealist stuff.” Sherman has said. “What I didn’t want were pictures showing strong 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. The movie isn’t necessarily funny or happy, but in those publicity photos, if there’s one character, she’s smiling.
It was in European film stills that I’d find women who were more neutral, and maybe the original films were harder to figure out as well.
I found that more mysterious. I looked for it consciously. … None of the Film Still characters was a particular stretch because I never knew what I was setting out to do—it wasn’t like I had these visions in my head that I had to realize. Some of the photographs are meant to be a solitary woman and some are meant to allude to another person outside the frame” (C. Sherman, ibid., p. 8).
In fact, Arthur Danto has developed a name for Sherman’s characters, christening them “The Girl in Trouble.” All of these women are seductresses, as is Sherman herself. Danto has explained, “The stills are dense with suspense and danger and they all look as if they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The invariant subject is The Girl in Trouble, even if The Girl herself does not always know it…The girl is always alone, waiting, worried, watchful, but she is wary of, waiting for, worried about, and her very posture and expression phenomenologically imply The Other: the Stalker, the Saver, the Evil and Good who struggle for her possession.... Each of the stills is about The Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and security that defines the human condition” (A. Danto, quoted in Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills, New York, 1990, pp. 13–14). Yet, Sherman and her women have an inherent power derived from the artist’s awareness of the roles bestowed upon women. The present photograph hinders the viewer from making any singular reading or trope, instead augmenting the possibilities of interpretation through imagined narratives. Both cannily familiar, yet impossible to identify, #21 do not exist in any “original” form—not in an actual film, nor in a publicity shot or ad—rather it is caught in an unusual limbo—the peculiar condition of being a copy without an original.
Sherman made her debut as an artist during the rise of the Feminist movement in the United States and Europe, when a number of art, film, and cultural critics such as Laura Mulvey endeavored to describe the ways in which film and art had positioned women as objects of desire instead of subjects with their own agency. Sherman’s work gave way to post-modern critiques about how certain manners of looking can be manipulated to regulate or oppress individuals within a culture. In Sherman’s appropriation of female tropes, she diminishes the power of androcentric imagination in cinema. She turns the “male gaze” on its head to further expand a singular interpretation into a myriad of possibilities, subsequently inviting a female voice into the conversation. As Mulvey has written about Sherman’s work, “Cindy Sherman’s art is certainly postmodern. Her works are photographs; she is not a photographer but an artist who uses photography. Each image is built around a photographic depiction of a woman. And each of the women is Sherman herself, simultaneously artist and model, transformed, chameleonlike, into a glossary of pose, gesture and facial expression” (L. Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of The Female Body,” in Cindy Sherman, Paris, 2006, p. 284).
Held in major international collections, Sherman’s photographs have amused and disturbed, affirmed and questioned with both a tenacity and fierceness that underscores the artifice and performance—the fiction—of the lived life. The Untitled Film Stills represents the artist at the beginning of her enormously influential and celebrated career, a knowing twenty-something who will undertake provocative and sustained explorations of contemporary female identity in series after series of eloquent photographic masterpieces—works that stand as ostensible cultural parodies, but which function, in fact, as chilling and trenchant acts of social critique.
“It was in European film stills that I’d find women who were more neutral, and maybe the original films were harder to figure out as well. I found that more mysterious. I looked for it consciously.” Cindy Sherman
Sherman recalls her intention for the Untitled Film Stills, and in particular a selection that features the same blonde woman with close-cropped curls that can be seen here, in #21. “At first I wanted to do a group of imaginary stills all from the same actress’s career, so in those first six photographs the hair doesn’t change all that much—I think I made her a blond because that seemed very actress-y and perhaps because I still had brown hair… I tried to make her look older in some, more of an ingénue in others, and older-trying-hard-to-look-younger in others. I didn’t think about what each movie was about, I focused on the different ages and looks of the same character” (C. Sherman, Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York, 2003, p. 8).
Since the late 1970s Sherman has scoured the American cultural unconscious, plucking images, symbols, and archetypes to investigate. Her intuitive, associative, playful, and subversive approach has redefined the medium of photography from a conversation about capturing moments on film, to a conceptually driven, performative approach that uses the camera as one tool among many used to construct an image. Sherman’s mind contains an endless catalogue of film and advertising images spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, from which she plucks images to become the basis of her photographs. These early works are hauntingly familiar of American film-noir, like those made by the great director Alfred Hitchcock, yet one can never quite pinpoint a particular film or actress being portrayed. “I liked the Hitchcock look, Antonioni, Neorealist stuff.” Sherman has said. “What I didn’t want were pictures showing strong 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. The movie isn’t necessarily funny or happy, but in those publicity photos, if there’s one character, she’s smiling.
It was in European film stills that I’d find women who were more neutral, and maybe the original films were harder to figure out as well.
I found that more mysterious. I looked for it consciously. … None of the Film Still characters was a particular stretch because I never knew what I was setting out to do—it wasn’t like I had these visions in my head that I had to realize. Some of the photographs are meant to be a solitary woman and some are meant to allude to another person outside the frame” (C. Sherman, ibid., p. 8).
In fact, Arthur Danto has developed a name for Sherman’s characters, christening them “The Girl in Trouble.” All of these women are seductresses, as is Sherman herself. Danto has explained, “The stills are dense with suspense and danger and they all look as if they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The invariant subject is The Girl in Trouble, even if The Girl herself does not always know it…The girl is always alone, waiting, worried, watchful, but she is wary of, waiting for, worried about, and her very posture and expression phenomenologically imply The Other: the Stalker, the Saver, the Evil and Good who struggle for her possession.... Each of the stills is about The Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and security that defines the human condition” (A. Danto, quoted in Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills, New York, 1990, pp. 13–14). Yet, Sherman and her women have an inherent power derived from the artist’s awareness of the roles bestowed upon women. The present photograph hinders the viewer from making any singular reading or trope, instead augmenting the possibilities of interpretation through imagined narratives. Both cannily familiar, yet impossible to identify, #21 do not exist in any “original” form—not in an actual film, nor in a publicity shot or ad—rather it is caught in an unusual limbo—the peculiar condition of being a copy without an original.
Sherman made her debut as an artist during the rise of the Feminist movement in the United States and Europe, when a number of art, film, and cultural critics such as Laura Mulvey endeavored to describe the ways in which film and art had positioned women as objects of desire instead of subjects with their own agency. Sherman’s work gave way to post-modern critiques about how certain manners of looking can be manipulated to regulate or oppress individuals within a culture. In Sherman’s appropriation of female tropes, she diminishes the power of androcentric imagination in cinema. She turns the “male gaze” on its head to further expand a singular interpretation into a myriad of possibilities, subsequently inviting a female voice into the conversation. As Mulvey has written about Sherman’s work, “Cindy Sherman’s art is certainly postmodern. Her works are photographs; she is not a photographer but an artist who uses photography. Each image is built around a photographic depiction of a woman. And each of the women is Sherman herself, simultaneously artist and model, transformed, chameleonlike, into a glossary of pose, gesture and facial expression” (L. Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of The Female Body,” in Cindy Sherman, Paris, 2006, p. 284).
Held in major international collections, Sherman’s photographs have amused and disturbed, affirmed and questioned with both a tenacity and fierceness that underscores the artifice and performance—the fiction—of the lived life. The Untitled Film Stills represents the artist at the beginning of her enormously influential and celebrated career, a knowing twenty-something who will undertake provocative and sustained explorations of contemporary female identity in series after series of eloquent photographic masterpieces—works that stand as ostensible cultural parodies, but which function, in fact, as chilling and trenchant acts of social critique.
“It was in European film stills that I’d find women who were more neutral, and maybe the original films were harder to figure out as well. I found that more mysterious. I looked for it consciously.” Cindy Sherman