Summary

Cindy Sherman is one of the most important artists of our time because she reveals that the image of woman is never neutral. Using her own body as a model, yet without placing herself autobiographically at the centre, she investigates how femininity is constructed through film, advertising, art history, fashion, make-up, costume and pose.

In her iconic series, such as Untitled Film Stills, Centerfolds, History Portraits and Society Portraits, Sherman appears again and again in a different role: housewife, film heroine, victim, aristocrat, society woman, clown or historical figure. Yet the work is never about one specific character. It is about the system behind the image: who is looking, who is being looked at, and which expectations are projected onto the female body.

Sherman makes visible how femininity often functions as a mask. Her strength lies not in tearing that mask away, but in showing how convincing, seductive and restrictive it can be. In doing so, she teaches us to look more critically at images of women — in art, film, fashion, media and our own time.

Work by Cindy Sherman is included in the immersive exhibition 100 Women in Art You Need to Know: five centuries of art and art history that rewrites the role of women in the history of art. 

Cindy Sherman: Woman as Mask, Image and Projection

Cindy Sherman is one of the most important artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not because she photographs herself again and again, but because, with that one body, she has made an entire system visible: the way women are looked at, coded, desired, feared, reduced and repeatedly fixed into roles.

At first glance, her work seems easy to describe. Sherman dresses up, applies make-up, chooses a setting, takes on a pose and photographs herself. But the longer one looks, the clearer it becomes that it is never really about Cindy Sherman as a person. She uses her own body not to reveal herself, but to show how images of women are made.

Her oeuvre is not an autobiography. It is an archive of masks.

That is precisely why Sherman remains so relevant. Long before social media, selfies, filters and beauty algorithms would come to define our visual culture, she understood that a woman rarely appears in an image neutrally. A face is never just a face. A dress is never just a dress. A gaze, a wig, a lip, a posture or a gesture always carries a history of expectations.

An Artist Who Does Not Depict Herself

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up on Long Island. She studied at Buffalo State College, where she initially focused on painting before moving into photography. That decision was decisive. Photography allowed her to work directly with the image culture of her time: film, television, advertising, magazines, fashion and art history.

From the beginning, Sherman did not make classical self-portraits. She used herself as a model, but not as the subject. That distinction is crucial. She appears in her photographs, but she does not tell her personal story. Instead, she disappears behind roles, clichés and projections.

In her studio, she becomes director, actress, stylist, costume designer, make-up artist, set builder and photographer all at once. Each image is a scene. Each character seems to come from somewhere: from a B-movie, a soap opera, a glamour magazine, a horror story, a Renaissance portrait or a nightmare. The viewer recognises something, but can never quite place it.

That is where the unease in her work begins. Sherman does not show us existing women, but images of femininity that already live in our heads.

Untitled Film Stills: The Masterpiece of the Constructed Woman

Her most iconic work is, without question, Untitled Film Stills from 1977–1980. Sherman made this series of black-and-white photographs shortly after moving to New York. She photographed herself in a range of female roles that evoke Hollywood films from the 1950s and 1960s, film noir, B-movies and European arthouse cinema.

The women in this series seem familiar: the lonely housewife, the young secretary, the woman on the run, the vulnerable ingénue, the seductress, the girl in the countryside, the woman in the city who suddenly seems to realise she is being watched. Yet these are not actual film stills. There is no film from which these images were taken. Sherman creates fictional images that feel like memories of films we have never seen.

That is the brilliance of the series. Sherman does not imitate one actress or one character. She imitates an image system. She shows how femininity is constructed through clichés: lighting, framing, clothing, hairstyle, direction of gaze, posture and threat. The woman in the image always seems to be in the middle of a story, but that story remains out of reach.

The viewer has to fill it in. And precisely through this, the viewer becomes visible as a co-maker of the image.

Untitled Film Stills is held as a complete series in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA acquired the series in 1995. It is now considered one of the key works of post-war photography and of the art of the Pictures Generation.

One of the best-known images from the series is Untitled Film Still #21 from 1978. Sherman appears as a young woman in an urban environment, often read as a “career girl” in a Hitchcock-like scene. A print is held in the collection of MoMA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art also owns a print of this work.

Untitled #96: Desire That Refuses to Be Looked at Calmly

After the Untitled Film Stills, Sherman made a series of colour photographs in the early 1980s known as the Centerfolds or Horizontals. The works refer to the format of magazine centerfolds: horizontal images, large, intimate, close to the body. But Sherman does not use this visual language to make eroticism easily consumable. She makes it uncomfortable.

One of the most famous works from this series is Untitled #96 from 1981. Sherman lies on a floor, dressed in an orange sweater and skirt, with an ambiguous, almost absent gaze. She holds a small piece of paper. The image appears vulnerable, but not passive. It appears seductive, but also disturbed. The viewer is placed in a position where looking no longer feels innocent.

That is Sherman’s strength. She takes an image form historically associated with availability and desire, and transforms it into psychological tension. The figure does not surrender to the gaze. She withholds something.

Untitled #96 is in the collection of MoMA in New York. The work is often considered one of Sherman’s most important photographs from the 1980s.

Untitled #93: The Scene After the Story

Another important work from the same period is Untitled #93 from 1981. Sherman lies in bed, blonde hair around her face, a dark blanket pulled against her body. The image is unsettling because it does not offer a clear situation. Has she just woken up? Is she frightened? Exhausted? Confused? Has something happened? Or is the viewer projecting that?

Sherman has emphasised that the work was not intended to be read in one fixed way, but the discussion around it shows exactly how her images function. They activate interpretation. They show how quickly a female body in an image is read through narratives of vulnerability, sexuality, threat or guilt.

Untitled #93 is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, where, according to the collection information, it is on view in Contemporary Art Gallery 296. The work is part of the broader group of Centerfolds in which Sherman explores the tension between desire, media imagery and psychological discomfort.

Untitled #153: The Body After Glamour

By the mid-1980s, Sherman’s work became darker, more bodily and more grotesque. In Untitled #153 from 1985, she presents herself as a muddy, almost dead figure in a landscape. Here, very little remains of the cinematic glamour of her earlier work. The body is no longer an object of desire, but something disturbed, vulnerable and threatening.

With images like this, Sherman expands her investigation. It is no longer only about stereotypes from film and media, but also about fear, violence, fairy tales, horror, death and disgust. She shows that the image of woman is shaped not only by beauty and desire, but also by nightmares, fantasies and cultural anxieties.

Untitled #153 is in the collection of MoMA in New York.

History Portraits: Art History as a Dressing Room

In the late 1980s, Sherman made her famous History Portraits. In this series, she uses the visual language of Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and neoclassical portraiture. She appears as a Madonna, aristocratic lady, courtesan, saint, heroine or historical figure. But her masquerade is never perfect. The prosthetics, false breasts, costumes and make-up are often just too visible, too theatrical, too artificial.

That is exactly the point. Sherman presents art history as a system of roles. Even the elevated portraits in museums turn out to be constructions: power, status, gender and beauty are carefully staged within them.

An important work from this series is Untitled #228 from 1990, in which Sherman appears as Judith, the biblical heroine who beheads Holofernes. The figure of Judith has been depicted countless times in art history, often by male artists. Sherman takes up that tradition, but makes it uncomfortable and theatrical. The heroine does not become a smooth icon, but an image in which power, violence, femininity and art history collide.

Untitled #228 is held, among other places, in the collection of MoMA in New York. The Broad Art Foundation also owns works by Sherman from related periods and holds several important Sherman works in its collection.

Society Portraits: Wealth, Age and the Fear of Decline

In 2008, Sherman made her Society Portraits, a series of large colour portraits of fictional women from upper social circles. These women appear in expensive clothing, against luxurious backgrounds, often with traces of cosmetic procedures, tense faces and carefully constructed dignity.

The images are painful because they do not simply mock. Sherman is sharp, sometimes cruel, but never superficial. She shows how women who age within a culture of status and youth can become trapped in an almost impossible demand: to remain visible, remain beautiful, appear wealthy, stay in control, not disappear.

In this series, beauty becomes a battlefield. The faces are not just faces, but maps of social pressure. Wrinkles, tightened skin, make-up, jewellery, clothing and background together form an image of class, fear and desire.

Untitled #468 from 2008, one of the works from this series, is in the collection of The Broad in Los Angeles. The Broad describes how the Society Portraits show older women in opulent settings, wearing expensive clothing and with faces that show signs of cosmetic intervention. Their artificiality points to the idea that images, characters and even the self are constructed.

Why Cindy Sherman Is Art Historically Important

Cindy Sherman changed the meaning of the photographic self-portrait. She showed that a self-portrait does not automatically have to be about the artist’s inner life. It can also be a tool for examining culture.

Her work is important because it shows that identity does not simply “exist”, but appears through codes. Gender, class, age, beauty, power and vulnerability are made visible through images we already know. Sherman takes those images apart by performing them again.

She belongs to a generation of artists who, in the 1970s and 1980s, looked critically at mass media, advertising, film and popular culture. But her work remains so powerful because it is not dryly theoretical. It is seductive, witty, uncomfortable, grotesque and sometimes deeply disturbing. You look first because the image is attractive or recognisable. Then you realise the image is looking back.

Sherman shows that femininity is not a fixed essence, but a role that is constantly being produced. By changing herself again and again, she shows that the “self” does not disappear, but becomes movable. Her work does not say: behind the mask is the real woman. Her work says, rather: look how powerful the mask is.

Why Her Work Is Still Urgent Today

Today, faces are constantly being made, edited and circulated. People present themselves through cameras, filters, profiles, avatars and social media. The idea that identity is an image construction has become everyday reality. But Sherman saw this much earlier.

That is why her work may be even more relevant today than when it was first made. She shows that image-making is not innocent. Every image carries expectations. Every image of a woman calls up old roles. Every mask can liberate, but it can also imprison.

Cindy Sherman teaches us to look more critically. Not only at art, but at all the images in which women appear: in films, campaigns, fashion, news, social media and art history. She shows that the question is not only who appears in the image, but also how that image is made, which codes direct it, and what role the viewer plays within it.

Her art makes the gaze responsible.

And that is where her lasting power lies. Cindy Sherman presents woman not as a fixed image, but as projection, construction and mask. She takes on the roles culture has prepared for women — and makes them crack from within.

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Sources

1. The Museum of Modern Art, New York — Cindy Sherman artist page.

2. The Museum of Modern Art, New York — Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, information on the complete series of 69 black-and-white photographs, acquired by MoMA in 1995.

3. The Museum of Modern Art, New York — collection pages for Untitled Film Still #21, Untitled #96, Untitled #153 and Untitled #228.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — collection page for Untitled Film Still #21.

5. The Art Institute of Chicago — collection page for Untitled #93, with reference to Gallery 296.

6. The Broad, Los Angeles — collection page for Untitled #468 and information on the Society Portraits.

7. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cindy Sherman biography.

8. Wikipedia — Cindy Sherman biography and overview.