Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is one of the greatest photographers and artists of the twenty-first century.  Her work shows woman, herself, in different poses and styles, as if she is trying to categorize all types of woman.  In her self-reflexive photographs and films, Sherman invents many different guises in which to present herself in.  She looks to show the different aspects from the Hollywood starlet, clowns, and society matrons, people we may recognize. 

Sherman’s work is a reflection of herself, since she uses herself in everything portrait she does.  This can be seen as she focuses her body of work on her self-portrait, but with disguising herself.  She uses wigs, makeup, backgrounds, and scenery as well as her camera to capture herself playing these many different roles.  The characters that Sherman creates are memorable, as if they lead lives outside of the frame, since we can pick up so much information about the character from the photograph.  From each other her pictures, we can begin to see the life of this made up person, who they are, where they live, what their life is like even though we know they are all the same person. 

One thing that Sherman does to leave complete ambiguity to her works is to leave them all untitled.  This allows the viewer to create all of the information in their own head, rather than putting name or title to the face with the help of a title.  Sherman’s study of portraiture and self-portraiture provides a new lens through which people can examine societal assumptions surrounding the gender and the evaluation of concept over style in her work.  Cindy Sherman’s work allows the viewers to create their own stories, while analyzing why this person is this way and what they are doing, leading all of the work to the viewers imaginations.  This is what makes Cindy Sherman a fine artist.     



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