Untitled

I'm really just using the mirror to summon something I don't even know until I see it.

[shermancindy1954]

Frequently Asked Questions

I’ve been getting these questions a lot, so I figured I’d just answer them all here instead going through each individually. If anyone has more questions feel free to reach out!

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When is your birthday?

I don’t know why so many of you are asking this when you could just look it up, but I was born January 19, 1954, in Glen Ridge, NJ.

How was your childhood?

I don’t talk much about my early life online, and I honestly don’t plan to in the future. What I will say is that my mother was wonderfully kind, I would describe her as good to a fault. As for my father, he was very strict. I wouldn’t hesitate to call him cruel. My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centered person. He was really racist and he'd talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even. That’s all I am going to say on the matter. 

How were you introduced to photography?

Honestly? I started taking pictures because I ran out of things to say through canvas. I had so much in my head that I wanted to get out into the world, and the medium of photography was a far easier way to do that. 

Why do you take so many self-portraits?

Honestly, everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible. I guess that’s your answer: it’s far easiest for me to us my own face because I know what my limits are.

What message do you want to spread through your work?

I think I always resented the fact that people thought I was trying to entertain them with my multifaceted, chameleon-like character changes. Although I liked doing that, I wasn't out to fool people and say 'Guess which one is me.' I don't analyze what I'm doing. I've read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I've noticed something that I wasn't aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I'm just very, very smart.

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I think that’s all for now. I hope that you know a little bit more about me now, and perhaps can spot my voice within my art with less effort. 

[shermancindy1954]

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled A 

Shirin Neshat’s Rebellious Silence

[shermancindy1954]

People think because it's photography it's not worth as much, and because it's a woman artist, you're still not getting as much - there's still definitely that happening. I'm still really competitive when it comes to, I guess, the male painters and male artists. I still think that's really unfair.

Cindy Sherman

[shermancindy1954]

Untitled #96

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Untitled #153

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Untitled Film Still #21

[shermancindy1954]

Cindy Sherman | MoMA

American, born 1954. For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo—who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art. Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”1 Shortly after moving to New York, she produced her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), in which she put on guises and photographed herself in various settings with deliberately selected props to create scenes that resemble those from mid-20th-century B movies. Started when she was only 23, these images rely on female characters (and caricatures) such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naif. Sherman used cinematic conventions to structure these photographs: they recall the film stills used to promote movies, from which the series takes its title. The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works. Sherman has continued to transform herself, displaying the diversity of human types and stereotypes in her images. She often works in series, improvising on themes such as centerfolds (1981) and society portraits (2008). Untitled #216, from her history portraits (1981), exemplifies her use of theatrical effects to embody different roles and her lack of attempt to hide her efforts: often her wigs are slipping off, her prosthetics are peeling away, and her makeup is poorly blended. She highlights the artificiality of these fabrications, a metaphor for the artificiality of all identity construction. While she sometimes portrays glamorous characters, Sherman has always been more interested in the grotesque. In the 1980s and 1990s, series such as the disasters (1986–89) and the sex pictures (1992) confronted viewers with the strange and ugly aspects of humanity in explicit, visceral images. “I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful; I’m much more fascinated with the other side,”2 she said in 1986. At the time, images of ailing bodies were painfully on view in the news during the AIDS crisis; these added poignancy to her investigation of the grotesque and of various types of violence that could be done to the body. In these series and throughout all of her work, Sherman subverts the visual shorthand we use to classify the world around us, drawing attention to the artificiality and ambiguity of these stereotypes and undermining their reliability for understanding a much more complicated reality. Introduction by Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, 2016 John Waters, “A Conversation with Cindy Sherman,” in Cindy Sherman, edited by Eva Respini (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 69. Larry Frascella, “Cindy Sherman’s Tales of Terror,” Aperture 86.103 (Summer 1986): 49.

[shermancindy1954]

I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

Cindy Sherman

[shermancindy1954]

Untitled #184