Decoding Cindy Sherman’s Many Roles, From Straphanger to Society Dame

No one does photography quite like Cindy Sherman (b. 1954). Since before the release of her acclaimed series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–1980), the artist has made incisive images about gender, identity, and society that nearly all use herself as the model—but never as the subject.

“Of course, in all of the photographs it’s her, but it’s also her, because it’s always a character that she is portraying,” Tanya Barson, the senior curatorial director at international gallery Hauser & Wirth, told me.

Barson is the curator of “Cindy Sherman. The Women,” an exhibition currently on view at the gallery’s Menorca, Spain, location. It features work from eight different series from across the artist’s career, from early student work, shot in black and white, to colorful large-format photographs from the last decade.

Over nearly 50 years, Sherman has been the consummate chameleon, losing herself in a wide range of assumed identities while skewering our societal expectations about how women are supposed to behave and present themselves to the world. Her work is a performance—but so too, she argues, are our own lives, informed by and responding to the way the world looks at women.

“I wanted to focus on something that’s quite core to Cindy Sherman’s work, which is the depiction of women, of femininity,” Barson added. She’s titled the show after Clare Boothe Luce’s influential 1936 play , which featured an all-female cast (and inspired film versions in 1939 and 2008).

“Clare Boothe Luce was a person who had multiple identities, roles within her life. She was a society hostess, she was a diplomat, she was an ambassador, she was a politician, she was a journalist, she was a playwright,” Barson said. “These kinds of multiple identities that women play within their lives are absolutely relevant to Cindy Sherman’s work.”

We spoke with the curator about the eight different photography series featured in the exhibition, and how Sherman has helped deconstruct our ideas about gender, aging, wealth, and privilege.

“Bus Riders” (1976)

The show includes some of Sherman’s earliest work, including small-format prints of photographs based on people she encountered on the bus, taken when she was still studying at Buffalo State University.

“There are three different series that we’re showing from that early moment in her
career where she is dressing up and adopting different characters,” Barson said. “She’s already become a master of observation and characterization. It is her doing the costumes and the makeup, but it’s also the mannerisms in each of the 
images—she adopts the poses of each person, the 
body language is the character.”

Sherman shot the “Bus Riders” series in the studio against a blank white wall, posing as various men or women traveling on public transit. Her straphangers are raising their arms aloft or sitting through their ride, clutching their belongings as they go about their day. But already, Sherman disappears into the work, adopting these alternate personas through thrifted costumes and props, makeup, and her poses and facial expressions. The seeds of her great career were planted here.

“There’s just the germ of almost everything that she then refines and perfects and explores,” Barson added. “And there is already those layers of media and observations in her work.”

“Murder Mystery” (1976)

Also shot during Sherman’s university days, with the same plain backdrop, is her “Murder Mystery” series. If “Bus Riders” was about the quotidian and the everyday, the people you encounter on the streets, “Murder Mystery” was Sherman dipping her toe into the fictional stock characters that would help make her name.

Where “Untitled Film Stills” mined film noir and B movies for feminine clichés, Sherman turned to Agatha Christie and the murder mystery genre to create the various personas in this early series. The Hauser & Wirth exhibition features the female roles from this sequence of 255 images, which includes the maid, the daughter, the drunken wife, and an actress, who meets her grim fate courtesy of a shadowy figure.

“They’re highly stylized 
archetypes,” Barson said. And they relate to themes that would become touchstones across Sherman’s career.

The actress, for instance, with her peroxide blonde hair and long satin evening gown, is echoed in the most recent work in the exhibition, Sherman’s “Flappers” series—and of course ties in directly to her breakthrough “Untitled Film Stills.”

“Line Up” (1977)

This early Sherman series stands somewhat apart from her student work in that the photos do not seem to have any narrative framework. Again, she’s used herself as the model, photographed in the studio in a variety of different costumes. But it’s much harder to place these over-the-top characters, with their carnival-esque face masks and dramatic outfits.

“They’re almost like images out of German Expressionist cinema. They’re quite extreme costumes and makeup, like kind of early 20th century avant-garde,” Barson said.

The black-and-white works show the young artist embracing theatricality, pushing her characters to the extreme, before she would reel it back in for the “Untitled Film Stills.” But Sherman would revisit this experimentation later in her career, allowing the women in her photographs to become more garishly outlandish, subverting expectations about femininity and the portrayal of women in art.

“Untitled Film Stills” (1977–1980)

The heart of the exhibition, of course, is Sherman’s famed “Untitled Film Stills,” black-and-white images, shot on location, of the artist posed to resemble a Hollywood starlet on set and in character. Much has been written about this groundbreaking series, which earned Sherman a place in the history of photography.

“Each one is utterly convincing as a potential film still, and yet they’re not,” Barson said. “There’s a real kind of attempt to evoke cinematic with these photographs as well as characterization through the figure, their expression, their makeup, and their costume and posture.”

By co-opting the movie industry’s visual language, Sherman was able to construct visual narratives that connected with viewers on a deep level—even though these aren’t from films that exist, they are inherently familiar. And faced with that familiarity, one stops to reconsider the stereotypes that inform each image, how such depictions of women help shape our own worldview, and what deeper truths hide behind these carefully crafted presentations of women.

“Society Portraits” (2008)

Here, the show jumps ahead a few decades, to the large-scale color photographs Sherman has produced in more recent years. Barson has added a piece from the artist’s informally christened society portraits series, displayed in a large, ornate gold frame.

Here, the subject is heavily made up, wrapped in furs, and trying, unsuccessfully, to seem younger than she is. The artist is confronting the specter of aging head-on, taking on the persona of a wealthy woman of a certain age—beautiful, but unable to hide the effects of aging, despite the many resources at her disposal.

“When I look at the society portraits, I see Cindy adopting these identities so carefully, and with such a degree of observation. There is a kind of identification and a sympathy for these women here,” Barson said. “There are so many things going on in these works. There’s some cruelty, there’s some comedy, there’s some really acute observation, but there’s also a wider critique of society that comes through these photographs.”

The pictures pose the question: if the struggle to accept aging is just vanity, or is the pressure that the fashion industry places on women to look a certain way, to hang on to their youthful appearance, to conform to the expectations of a society that doesn’t value them, just too great?

“Ominous Landscape” (2010)

Shot for an editorial assignment for  magazine, the “Ominous Landscape” series saw Sherman expanding the field of view, superimposing her characters against dramatic island backdrops that she digitally edited to look like paintings, in a nod to the long history of landscape painting.

Combining the artist’s interest in fashion and cinema, Sherman posed in Chanel clothing drawn from the company’s historic archives, from an original 1925 design by Coco Chanel herself, to looks of more recent vintage by Karl Lagerfeld. And, each of the landscapes has previously been featured in films.

“It’s Shelter Island, it’s Capri, it’s Stromboli, and I think Iceland is there as well—I thought that island connection was a really nice place to start since the gallery on Menorca is on an island,” Barson said. “But there’s so much going on that you have to unpack when one looks at her work to understand quite how complex and constructed and layered it is.”

Harper’s Bazaar (2016/2018)

Sherman has had various collaborations with the fashion industry throughout her career, shooting ads for Balenciaga, Marc Jacobs, and Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons. But these weren’t typical fashion photoshoots, making a beautiful image to help sell high-end clothes. Instead, Sherman took these opportunities to critique consumer culture and skewer accepted beauty standards with unflattering portrayals of herself in various guises.

From this area of her practice, Barson selected images that grew out of a 2016 cover shoot with . Taking on the role of a fashion-obsessed socialite, Sherman photographed herself in outfits by contemporary designers, including Jacobs.

“These are not intended to be read as fashion models, but as society women who are the consumers of high fashion,” Barson said. “And again, you get a sense of how women of wealth
 are engaging in the construction of certain personas, but they’re also somehow victims of a culture in which the image is everything.”

“Flappers” (2016–2018)

The newest work in the show is Sherman’s “Flappers” series, inspired by 1920s- and ’30s-era Hollywood publicity photos. The young women of the era were considered rebellious, with their bobbed hair and short skirts, and rejection of conservative societal norms about sex and alcohol.

But Sherman revisits those archetypes decades later, again addressing how women deal with the loss of their youth.

“There’s this theme of the aging beauty, the aging starlet from the golden age of Hollywood cinema,” Barson said, noting that Sherman was specifically inspired by the character of past-her-prime movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson, herself a former silent film actress) in the 1950 film .

Sherman’s characters conform, but at what cost? The artist herself, however, never does.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com