Photo reblogged from Reality Asylum with 84 notes
Cindy Sherman - bikini, from the series Air Shutter Release Fashions, 1975.
… photograph taken from the book Cindy Sherman: The Early Work, 1975-77, Catalogue Raisonné at the SF MoMA earlier today. (the only nudes i’ve ever seen of Cindy Sherman)
Photo reblogged from A bell rings loudest on its own front porch with 192 notes
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #32, 1979
See this photograph on MoMA’s site here.
Photo reblogged from A bell rings loudest on its own front porch with 226 notes
CINDY SHERMAN | Untitled Film Still #81, 1980 | gelatin silver print
Source: phillipsauction
Photo with 14 notes
Untitled Film Still #62 by Cindy Sherman, 1977
“Sherman began making these pictures in 1977, when she was twenty-three. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills—or perhaps like publicity pix—purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen (#3) and lounging in the bedroom (#6). On to something, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the luscious librarian (#13, at left), the domesticated sex kitten (#14), the hot-blooded woman of the people (#35), the ice-cold sophisticate (#50), and others. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.
Other artists had drawn upon popular culture, but Sherman’s strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones—those 8-by-10-inch glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it is not real.
In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The sixty-nine solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America—the period of Sherman’s youth, and the ground-zero of our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large.
Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick, and it arises from Cindy Sherman’s uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp. As Warhol said, “She’s good enough to be a real actress.””
— Excerpt from Peter Galassi’s commentary in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1995-96 Annual Report - for Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills exhibition at MoMA, 1997, organised by Galassi
Page 1 of 4