Cindy Sherman

Cindy sherman artwork

Cindy Sherman Uses What Kind Of Photography

Cindy Sherman belongs to the so-called Pictures Generation, a group of American artists raised in the golden era of mass media, the booming Fifties, and come of age in the turbulent and disillusioned early Seventies.

Summary of Cindy Sherman

Cindy ShermanCindy Sherman

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 1980s, 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 , Sherman turned to photography toward the end of the 1970s 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. 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.

Cindy Sherman

Accomplishments

Cindy Sherman Photographer

  • Recalling a long tradition of self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing in art, Sherman utilizes the camera and the various tools of the everyday cinema, such as makeup, costumes, and stage scenery, to recreate common illusions, or iconic 'snapshots,' that signify various concepts of public celebrity, self confidence, sexual adventure, entertainment, and other socially sanctioned, existential conditions. As though they constituted only a first premise, however, these images promptly begin to unravel in various ways that suggest how self identity is often an unstable compromise between social dictates and personal intention.
  • Sherman's photographic portraiture is both intensely grounded in the present while it extends long traditions in art that force the audience to reconsider common stereotypes and cultural assumptions, among the latter political satire, caricature, the graphic novel, pulp fiction, stand-up comedy (some of her characters are indeed uncomfortably 'funny'), and other socially critical disciplines.
  • Sherman's many variations on the methods of self-portraiture share a single, notable feature: in the vast majority of her portraits she directly confronts the viewer's gaze, no less in the case of posed sex dolls, as though to suggest that an underlying penchant for deception is perhaps the only 'value' that truly unites us.
  • Long assumed to be a medium that 'mirrors' reality with precision, photography in Sherman's hands simultaneously constructs and critiques its apparent subject. In this sense, Sherman's unique form of portrait photography functions, in part, as a sign for the subjective nature of all human intelligence and the unstable nature of visual perception.

Biography of Cindy Sherman

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Cindy Sherman Photographer

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.'

Cindy Sherman Artwork

  • Cindy Sherman is one of the best-known and most important photographers working today. Her decades-long performative practice of photographing herself under different guises has produced many of contemporary art’s most iconic and influential images.
  • Cindy Sherman (.1954) is a pivotal figure in the history of appropriation art and one of the world’s best-known contemporary artists. Since the late 1970s, she has been photographing herself in roles inspired by mass-media stereotypes, but also real people and art-historical imagery. Her unique quasi-theatrical approach reveals the degree to which these stereotypes are entrenched in the.
  • CindySherman.com is a tribute to Cindy Sherman, the photographer, model, and filmmaker. This site contains a store and shop, as well as many links of interest.