View the photographs from Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series. Many of the photos from the series can be viewed at these two websites:

What are your general reactions? Choose one image and write a 250+ word interpretation, bringing in readings from this week. Respond to your classmates’ choices and interpretations.

Untitled Film Still #14. Cindy Sherman. 1978.

The most obvious aspect of Cindy Sherman's photography, for me, is that she is making a feminist statement within them- satirizing conventional roles of women and how society wants them photographed. The series Untitled Film Stills in particular seems to place her in a variety of these typical "female" settings, but there's an edge to them; an attitude. She never smiles for the camera, and often looks angry or defiant. In some of the self-portraits she wears a blank, almost robotic stare. She seems to avoid any trace of being intentionally "sexy" for the camera. It's an unsettling effect that she achieves consistently in her work, to great effect. It draws us in, makes us rethink photography's cliches regarding women.

Objectification is part of Sherman's commentary. As John Berger observes, "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at... Thus she turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision" (PCI 178). I very much appreciate that Sherman is subtle and understated in her approach. Simplicity is the ideal in art, and difficult to achieve- it's easy to be intentionally complex. (I cite the Roberta McGrath essay in our reading for this unit as an example of the latter).

There are some details in the above photo worth noting: There's something odd in her right hand. (She's gripping it like a knife, but it appears to be made of some velvety material). The table in the foreground is also reflected in the mirror; there's a cocktail glass on it, and smoke (cigarette?) is rising near the bottom right-hand corner. A folding chair has some clothes draped across it.  I also appreciate the framed portrait of a woman behind her (blown up, I'm pretty sure it's a movie star, but I can't place a name to her). Overall, I think the implication is that someone else is in the room with our model (Sherman); probably a male- and she is ambivalent about the situation.

I learned at Wikipedia that she shot 69 of these in all, and sold the entire collection to the Museum of Modern Art in 1995 for $1 million. For such powerful images, I'd say that was a bargain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sherman (Links to an external site.)