Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #21

Who is this woman? Does she look familiar? But where have you seen her before? Perhaps this woman in the big city is from a film by Alfred Hitchcock. But in fact, this image is not from any actual movie. Untitled film still number 21 is a photograph by the American artist Cindy Sherman. In this image, Sherman is both the director and actor. In Sherman's art, we are drawn into the ambiguous world of a fictional character. The image visualizes both the world around this woman as well as the world within her. This work holds our imagination in the tension between the imposing architecture of New York City and the concentration on the woman's face. The visual weight of these shadowed towers is balanced by the radiance of the light that draws our eye towards her. By positioning this unnamed protagonist slightly off-center, Sherman activates the moment, suggesting that something is about to happen. We are compelled to imagine this woman's future. Is she overwhelmed by her situation, or does she control her own destiny? I'm inclined to read this image as Sherman's forceful visualization of her own creative personhood. This work, created in 1978, is from a series of 70 black and white photographs. These are collectively known as the Untitled Film Stills. Among the most celebrated works from Sherman's Untitled Film Still series, this photograph is one of the most iconic images of contemporary art. Cindy Sherman, who was born in 1954, began the Untitled Film Stills in 1977, shortly after she moved to New York City, and continued to work on the series through 1980. After inventing a fictional persona, often inspired by items of vintage clothing, Sherman would stage moments, moments that might have been in a film. Some Untitled Film Stills were performed in her apartment, some were taken in locations around New York City, and some were created while Sherman was traveling outside of the city. Having gained critical recognition with her Untitled Film Stills, Sherman has worked with remarkable consistency and creativity for a half-century. Perhaps what has most distinctly characterized Sherman's artistic project is her continual reinvention of herself. Sherman had concluded her highly celebrated Untitled Film Stills series in 1980. And, by 1981, she had completely transformed her art with a series called The Centerfolds. More recently, Sherman created a series of society portraits. Perhaps these women are former film stars. They convey a confidence, gained by experience, in their own identity. Sherman's artistic project is unified by an exploration into the ways in which a person might develop and express their creative character. There are few artists for whom self-reinvention is more central to their creative project than Cindy Sherman. Not only has she transformed her appearance into an astounding range of characters, but she has recreated herself as an artist several times over. Having reached the pinnacle of the art world by 1980, Sherman has spent the last half-century reimagining the aesthetic methods and conceptual limits of her art. Sherman is one of the most innovative and compelling artists working today. By continually reinventing her image, she embodies one of the central values of our contemporary culture—the ability and the compulsion to recreate oneself.