24.
Cindy
Sherman
US-1954
£4,112,566
£3,643,200-£4,857,600
CHR-NY
11/12/2014
PAE: £3,643,200-£4,857,600
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, Untitled Film Still #2
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, Untitled Film Still #2, signed, titled, numbered and dated '2 Cindy Sherman 4/10 1977' (on the reverse), gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm.), Executed in 1977. This work is number four from an edition of ten. © Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others.

Born in 1954, American photographer, Cindy Sherman gained international recognition for a series of photographs titled “Untitled Film Stills”, 1977-1980, in which she assumed both the role of photographer and subject, altering the idea of self-portraiture by assuming the guises of the film star or style she impersonated and subsequently disappearing within this character as a form of self-appropriation. Sherman is calling attention to the ways in which mass culture and mass media shape our self-image, and how we in turn author or appropriate our self for mass distribution (prophetic of today’s “selfie”/Photoshop culture). In 1990, Sherman explained to The New York Times, “I think of becoming a different person. I look into a mirror next to the camera…it’s trance-like. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens...When I see what I want, my intuition takes over—both in the 'acting' and in the editing. Seeing that other person that’s up there, that’s what I want. It’s like magic.” Through her work “Untitled Film Stills” and “Centerfolds/Horizontals”, 1981, the self-projection that Sherman displays, borrowed from dominant Hollywood themes and pornography, is depicted as a defenseless or caught-off-guard female intruded by a foreign gaze. Not always a femme fatale or sexual object, Sherman’s other fabrications include, clowns, aging society women, renaissance portraits, men and more. She is currently represented by Spruth Magers, in Berlin and London and Metro Pictures in New York. Her contemporaries include Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger and Robert Longo. Her photographs are some of the most expensive ever sold. Sherman lives and works in New York.

Video: Cindy Sherman - Nobody's Here But Me (1994). Broadcasted on BBC Arena, 24th April 1994.