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Lot Essay
Immediately after leaving the State University, Buffalo, New York in 1977, Sherman created a series of photographic images of herself, in small black and white prints, known as Untitled Film Stills.
Each of the images depicts the artist, costumed to represent a female movie protagonist in a setting consonant with the photograph's mood. None of them replicate specific movies; all investigate the ways in which women are represented and images of them constructed. They were, and remain, the subject of analytical arguments concerning the role of women, their presentation and exploitation in a society dominated by the power of the male gaze.
In this series Sherman begins the extraordinary process of transformation of her image which is in all her work. She captures the seductiveness of being able to transform herself and the potency of her representative role as it changes through the series. Some of her women, as here, are seductresses and she wrote of her concerns with portraying them: "to pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality--growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl." (in G. Howell, "Anatomy of An Artist," Art Papers 19, no. 4 (July/August 1995) p. 7)
Each of the images depicts the artist, costumed to represent a female movie protagonist in a setting consonant with the photograph's mood. None of them replicate specific movies; all investigate the ways in which women are represented and images of them constructed. They were, and remain, the subject of analytical arguments concerning the role of women, their presentation and exploitation in a society dominated by the power of the male gaze.
In this series Sherman begins the extraordinary process of transformation of her image which is in all her work. She captures the seductiveness of being able to transform herself and the potency of her representative role as it changes through the series. Some of her women, as here, are seductresses and she wrote of her concerns with portraying them: "to pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality--growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl." (in G. Howell, "Anatomy of An Artist," Art Papers 19, no. 4 (July/August 1995) p. 7)