Cindy Sherman Biography

Cindy Sherman, born as Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American photographer best known is known for her elaborately disguised self-portraits that focus on social role-playing and sexual stereotypes.

She is best known for Complete Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs which were meant to subvert the stereotypes of women in media (namely arthouse films and popular b-movies). In the 1980s, Sherman used color film and large prints and focused more on lighting and facial expression.

In 1995, Sherman was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 she received an honorary doctorate degree from the Royal College of Art, London.

Cindy Sherman Age

Cindy was born on January 19, 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, U.S.A. She is 65 years old as of 2019.

Cindy Sherman Education

Cindy enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. During this time, she began to explore the ideas which became a hallmark of her work.

She dressed as different characters, cobbled together from thrift-store clothing. Frustrated with what she saw as the limitations of painting as a medium of art, she abandoned it and took up photography.

There was nothing more to say, she recalled. I was meticulously copying other art, and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead. Sherman has said about this time. One of the reasons I started photographing myself was that supposedly in the spring one of my teachers would take the class out to a place near Buffalo where there were waterfalls and everybody romps around without clothes on and takes pictures of each other. I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this. But if we’re going to have to go to the woods I better deal with it early.

Luckily we never had to do that. She spent the remainder of her college education focused on photography. Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credited with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms. At college, she met Robert Longo, a fellow artist who encouraged her to record her process of dolling up for parties. This was the beginning of her Untitled Film Still series.

Cindy Sherman Married

Sherman married director Michel Auder in 1984, making her stepmother to Auder’s daughter, Alexandra, and her half-sister Gaby Hoffmann. They divorced in 1999. From 2007 to 2011, she had a relationship with the artist David Byrne. Between 1991 and 2005, she lived in a fifth-floor co-op loft at 84 Mercer Street in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood; she later sold it to actor Hank Azaria. She bought two floors in a 10-story condo building overlooking the Hudson River in West Soho, and today uses one as her apartment and the other as her studio and office.

Cindy Sherman Net Worth

The only woman on the list and as the third richest NY artist with an estimated net worth of $35 million is Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman Photography

Cindy Sherman is a contemporary master of socially critical photography. She is a key figure of the Pictures Generation, a loose circle of American artists who came to artistic maturity and critical recognition during the early 1980s, a period notable for the rapid and widespread proliferation of mass media imagery.
At first painting in a super-realist style in art school during the aftermath of American Feminism, Sherman turned to photography toward the end of the 1970s in order to explore a wide range of common female social roles or personas. Sherman sought to call into question the seductive and often oppressive influence of mass-media over our individual and collective identities…..Mary Wiseman

Turning the camera on herself in a game of extended role-playing of fantasy Hollywood, fashion, mass advertising, and “girl-next-door” roles and poses, Sherman ultimately called her audience’s attention to the powerful machinery and make-up that lay behind the countless images circulating in an incessantly public, plugged-in culture.

Sexual desire and domination, the fashioning of self-identity as mass deception, these are among the unsettling subjects lying behind Sherman’s extensive series of self-portraiture in various guises. Sherman’s work is central in the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation at the close of the 20th century.

Recalling a long tradition of self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing in art, Sherman utilizes the camera and the various tools of the everyday cinema, such as makeup, costumes, and stage scenery, to recreate common illusions, or iconic “snapshots,” that signify various concepts of public celebrity, self confidence, sexual adventure, entertainment, and other socially sanctioned, existential conditions. As though they constituted only a first premise, however, these images promptly begin to unravel in various ways that suggest how self-identity is often an unstable compromise between social dictates and personal intention.

Sherman’s photographic portraiture is both intensely grounded in the present while it extends long traditions in art that force the audience to reconsider common stereotypes and cultural assumptions, among the latter political satire, caricature, the graphic novel, pulp fiction, stand-up comedy (some of her characters are indeed uncomfortably, and other socially critical disciplines.

Sherman’s many variations on the methods of self-portraiture share a single, notable feature: in the vast majority of her portraits she directly confronts the viewer’s gaze, no less in the case of posed sex dolls, as though to suggest that an underlying penchant for deception is perhaps the only value” that truly unites us. Long assumed to be a medium that mirrors” reality with precision, photography in Sherman’s hands simultaneously constructs and critiques its apparent subject. In this sense, Sherman’s unique form of portrait photography functions, in part, as a sign for the subjective nature of all human intelligence and the unstable nature of visual perception.

Cindy Sherman Film Stills

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills comprises of over seventy black and white photographs made between 1977 and 1980. When thinking about this series, some aspects of her entire body of work immediately come to mind: disguise and theatricality, mystery and voyeurism, melancholy and vulnerability.

The artist initially started these series in her apartment, using her own interior as setting for the scenes. Soon, however, she moved her camera and props outside and shot in urban and rural landscapes as well, requiring a second person to assist her in taking the photograph. The artist Robert Longo, with whom she lived at that time, assisted her for a while, as well as her father, other family members, and friends.

Each individual image creates a distinguished scene. Untitled Film Still #21 for example, reminds of a scene from an outdated television show or movie, with the woman in the picture as the leading heroine, wearing a vintage 1950s outfit and looking captivated by something outside the frame. This creates suspense: we will never know what happens across the street from this woman. It makes the image not so much about what is happening in the picture, but more about what happened before and after the moment it was shot. This narrative element is characteristic of Untitled Film Stills. The scenes are recognizable as film stills – imitating typical cinematic angles, lighting, and dramatization – but they come from no particular movie.

Since she became renowned as an artist in the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman played with the slipperiness of identity. In Untitled Film Stills, but also in all her later series, it is always Sherman herself who is in front of the camera. Yet these images are never really self-portraits. Sherman uses photography as a tool to deceive, and evades her own personality by taking on different identities. With vintage clothing, wigs, and make-up, she creates an entire range of personalities.

Sherman takes on many roles, also behind the camera: photographer, director, hairdresser, set designer, and stylist. In conducting herself to working with only her own body, she is capable to explore the endless possibilities of this seemingly limited subject. The different personas Sherman depicts are stereotypes; they represent a series of clichés: career girl, bombshell, fashion victim, schoolgirl, society lady, etc. – all characters deeply embedded in our cultural history.

They resemble publicity pictures made on movie sets, adopted from female roles in magazines, advertisements and especially movies. All Sherman’s personas in Untitled Film Stills project the constructed idea of the women’s image, pointing out the arbitrariness of the female stereotypes.

In 1995, MoMA bought the entire series Untitled Film Stills from the artist and presented a solo exhibition with Sherman dedicated to the Untitled Film Stills two years later. Perhaps the success of this particular series lies in the fact that the images are so generic: we are not supposed to know where the images are shot or what exactly happens – the viewer can always add his or her share of imagination. In this timeless point of view, Sherman tells us that just like her construction of identities, everyone can be anything, anytime, anywhere.

Cindy Sherman Films