#cindysherman

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 I love this photograph, a postcard version has lived with me for years on my desk pinboard. A young woman in 1950s America, her white lapels towering up to her face like the skyscrapers that are loading the frame around her, urging on her ambition while holding onto her trepidation.

With the looming, image-making dramatic tools so prevalent, prying eyes out from window after window, her own knowing she is being watched while being watchful, you can’t help but consider if this is in fact a still from a Kubrick-esque film? Actually, wait, aren’t we sure this IS from that Kubrick film…? Haven’t we seen this Untitled Film Still #21 city girl on screen, on her first day in the post-war corporate world? Don’t we know what happens to her? To this type of girl? Don’t we all know what happens to #21?  

And the luscious librarian (#13), the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the ingenue setting out on life's journey (#48), and the tough but vulnerable film noir idol (#54)? We remember seeing them too right?

Who is she again?

This is the artist Cindy Sherman

Sherman has staged a long career rotating the camera round to capture herself as other characters. In this career breakout Untitled Film Still series, she plays a fictitious young female actress playing a slew of fictional female roles. Seventy to be precise, captured over three years. That’s seven-zero different, yet so familiar and recognizable, female characters - an inexhaustible and insatiable female roster to cast from when playing up for the cameras.

In 2021, it came to light that researchers at Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, had found that “Sharing or viewing filtered selfies in stories made people feel worse,” and that “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

But over forty years ago, before pocket-living phones were a one-stop portable camera, self-promotion and mass transmission device, Sherman was already investigating, with care and informed handling, how the sense of self elasticates with both a growing power-yielding tension and threatening snap slap back when women turn the camera on themselves.

I went to a party last week, coincidently at the MoMA in New York which has the original Untitled Film Still #21 as part of its permanent collection. Lots of people and personalities were there in their sartorial costumed finery having their photo taken or taking it themselves. I even took a selfie or two with my alter ego who was in residence for the evening.