CINDY SHERMAN (1954- )
Untitled Film Still #52. Silver print, the image measuring 6⅜x9½ inches (16.2x24.1 cm.), the sheet 8x10 inches (20.3x25.4 cm.), with Sherman's signature, date, and edition notation 4/10 in ink on verso. 1979

Provenance: Metro Pictures, New York, New York, 1983

Cindy Sheman's Untitled Film Stills, a body of work that includes 70 black-and-white photographs, is one of the seminal bodies of work of the 20th century. In each, Sherman posed as a generic female film character, or more specifically, as an actress playing a character, modeled on a scene that could be from 1950s or 60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, or a European art house film. Rarely do these images reference specific works, but rather are deliberately generic, recalling types: the working girl, the vamp, the lonely housewife, and others. All of Sherman's Film Stills feature the central character alone, though she often seems to be looking just off-camera, her focus elsewhere, placing us, the viewer, in the uncomfortable role of voyeur. By keeping the scene open to interpretation, by suffusing the scenes with both danger and suspense and beauty and seduction, Sherman inserted herself into a dialogue about the role of stereotypes and femininity in contemporary culture.

Sherman's series began just after she graduated from Buffalo State College and moved to New York. She shot the initial images in her apartment, but quickly moved out to the streets of the city. Originally exhibited at Hallwalls in Buffalo in slight variants, and mimicking the publicity still format, the 8x10 glossy photographs initially recalled disposable prints rather than works of art. Each of the photographs were deliberately priced at fifty dollars when they were first exhibited. “I wanted them to seem cheap and trashy. Something you’d find in a novelty store and buy for a quarter. I didn’t want them to look like art” (E. Respini, Cindy Sherman, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012, p. 21-22).

In the essay "The Making of Untitled" Sherman wrote: "I suppose unconsciously, or semiconsciously at best, I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women. The characters weren't dummies; they weren't just airhead actresses. They were women struggling with something but I didn't know what. The clothes make them seem a certain way, but then you look at their expression, however slight it may be, and wonder if maybe "they" are not what the clothes are communicating. I wasn't working with a raised "awareness," but I definitely felt that the characters are questioning something-perhaps being forced into a certain role. At the same time, those roles are in film: the women aren't being lifelike, they're acting. There are so many levels of artifice. I like that whole jumble of ambiguity." (Cindy Sherman, The Complete Untitled Film Stills, (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2003)