Cindy sherman biography timeline project

Cindy Sherman is a contemporary master of socially critical photography. She is a key figure of the " Pictures Generation ," a loose circle of American artists who came to artistic maturity and critical recognition during the early s, a period notable for the rapid and widespread proliferation of mass media imagery. At first painting in a super-realist style in art school during the aftermath of American Feminism , Sherman turned to photography toward the end of the s in order to explore a wide range of common female social roles, or personas.

Sherman sought to call into question the seductive and often oppressive influence of mass-media over our individual and collective identities.

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Turning the camera on herself in a game of extended role-playing of fantasy Hollywood, fashion, mass advertising, and "girl-next-door" roles and poses, Sherman ultimately called her audience's attention to the powerful machinery and make-up that lay behind the countless images circulating in an incessantly public, "plugged in" culture. Sexual desire and domination, the fashioning of self-identity as mass deception, these are among the unsettling subjects lying behind Sherman's extensive series of self-portraiture in various guises.

Sherman's work is central in the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation at the close of the 20th century. Talking about her self-portraits, Cindy Sherman described how, as the youngest child and "total latecomer" in her family, she often dressed up to occupy herself, wondering, "If you don't like me this way, how about you like me this way?

Or maybe you like this version of me. Untitled Film Still 13 issues from Sherman's epic "Untitled Film Still" series they did not actually derive from a larger movie of the late s, by which she first made a widespread reputation for herself as a witty commentator on the female role models of her youth, as well as those of an earlier generation.

In this example, Sherman employs her own image as to suggest the central character in a s "coming of age" romance, the young female intellectual on the verge of discovering her "true womanhood," or the prototypical virgin. Maturing in the s in the midst of the American Womens' Movement, later known as the rise of Feminism, Sherman and her generation learned to see through mass media cliches and appropriate them in a satirical and ironic manner that made viewers self conscious about how artificial and highly constructed "female portraiture" could prove on close inspection.

Some critics criticize Sherman's Film Stills for catering to the male gaze and perpetuating the objectification of women.

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Others, understand Sherman's approach as critically-ironic parody of female stereotypes. Others still, assert that both cases are simultaneously true, with Sherman knowingly taking on stereotypical female roles in order to question their pervasiveness. At the same time her adoption of these roles inevitably leads her to be objectified further.