Rebecca Arnold, Artist Blog: Cindy Sherman

Pretty much all of Cindy Sherman's work influences me, but her Untitled Film Stills series is what I follow the most. Each photograph of the series is black and white, 69 of them total. Sherman started her series a grainy/slightly out of focus quality shooting at her own apartment, and eventually branched out and took photographs from different areas - Arizona,a family beach house, and New York. Her final images of the series often featured a herself as a victim quintessential of film noir.

While Sherman's work is based around feminism, there are many other elements in her photography. In her Untitled Film Stills series, she places herself in the frame as an unidentifiable actress in shots comparable to Hollywood photographs, B-movies, foreign films and film noir. The photographs look like movie stills falsely catching the unnamed blond in familiar, unguarded situations. Her newly pop-culture strategy was subjective, and functioned just as real film stills - 8 x 10-inch glossy photographs.

Untitled Film Still #50

These prints were "designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it is not real" (Moma.org). I'm making this point its own paragraph because it was an "ah-ha" moment for me. This is what I'm interested in! I knew Cindy Sherman before I started thinking about my body of work for this year but I never put the two together so well. She's really making it easy on me - or maybe hard, since I can't copy her either.


In the Untitled Film Stills Sherman portrays fictional women, but we relate or recognize them. We're drawn in without Sherman having to give it all away, with no obvious irony or hint. Warhol apparently said, "She's good enough to be a real actress."

Untitled Film Still #14

"Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills are not only photographic records of performances, but, inversely, performative accounts of filmic images" (Moma.org).

In her images the protagonist is shown doing various housewife activities like preening in the kitchen and relaxing in the bedroom. Sherman experimented with characters in other roles too as a foxy librarian, a domesticated sex kitten, etc. She said that she stopped when she ran out of clichés.

http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/sherman/

http://www.coskunfineart.com/biography.asp?artistID=33

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sherman