| Dates: | 1954, 19 January - | | Born: | US, NJ, Glen Ridge | | Active: | US |
American photographer who has made a career out of photographing herself in various roles out of popular culture.Preparing biographies
Cindy Sherman became one of the most successful artists in the world during the 1980's. Her series of Untitled Film Stills examines archetypal images of women, by casting herself in the central role of every picture. Sherman makes us aware of just how immediately recognisable these images are and by acting out a bewildering variety of roles, surrounded by props, and altering her make-up, hair and costume, she shows how identities are a form of social performance. Her more recent work has used everything from historical costumes to false body parts to explore historical and forbidden images.
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 11 Nov 2011.
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Biography provided by Focal Press
Sherman emerged as a key figure in the art world in the 1980s with her series Untitled Film Stills — black and white images that explore gender, identity, mythmaking and the media. She combines performance, masquerade, and photography’s innate collusion with veracity to create film stills of herself as the solitary female heroine in an American drama; her fictional identities were inspired by movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Sherman’s chameleon-like capacity for self-transformation, her blurring of the real and unreal, and her use of saturated color materials and large scale audaciously explore her notion of human identity as a cultural construct.
(Author: Garie Waltzer - Photographer and consultant)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
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| Wikipedia has a biography of this photographer. | Show on this site | Go to website | | Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. | | Go to website | Grove Art Online (www.groveart.com) has a biography of this artist.
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