The Untitled Film Stills Series by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman was 25 when she released the Untitled Film Stills series – the year was 1977, and this work didn’t benefit from the reputation the artist has today. These 70 images produced over three years introduced black and white shots that you’d expect, or rather that one would demand from women in cinema. With the absence of a title and color anchoring these images in a kind of timelessness, it’s here that Cindy Sherman’s method can be understood. The photographer sought to depersonalize and put an accent on shots that were witnesses to a society rather than to a particular era. In an almost entirely male-dominated world, Sherman’s work is like a mirror that deftly deforms the status and role attributed to women in the public eye.

With the series Untitled Film Stills, she highlights different female figures in daily life as presented in one of the most so-called “progressive” arts: cinema. A sexy starlet, a happily submissive maid, naive or hard-working, Cindy Sherman brings out many a stereotype. A prostitute, a crying woman, a child, an actress, Sherman incarnates them one-by-one in fictitious settings composed by herself. This is where Cindy Sherman’s work gains in eloquence: with wigs, makeup, and her New York loft in the background, this chameleon questions identity by proving that a woman’s femininity derives from that which one desires most in her. Behind these characters, many would see a feminist manifesto.

“While I never considered my work to be feminist or a political statement, for sure everything found in it was drawn from my observations as a woman in this culture,” she explained. Both actress and director, Cindy Sherman seeks to disturb, to study the various ways in which images provoke discipline in women. Untitled Film Stills intelligently denounces, taking themes from Hollywood movies that put stars like Marilyn Monroe centerstage – these same women that were acclaimed and fantasized about for their own so-called freedom. The ambiguity is real, and the body language and facial expressions of her characters remain undefined, leaving the imagination to run free.