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CINDY SHERMAN
Untitled Movie Stills
Cindy Sherman transforms herself into a disquieting image of 1950s B-movie femininity in this photographic performance. Engaged with issues current in the early 1980s under the rubric of postmodernism, the work investigates the role of photography in the construction of the unified self, and makes explicit the power relations provoked by the act of looking.
The photographs belong to Sherman's serie of sixty-five grainy, black-and-white photographs reminiscent of "film noir" movie stills. Although Sherman is both model and photographer in these works, these images are not autobiographical. She photographs herself in various guises of stereotypical femininity, each a moment in a larger implied narrative.
Along with many artists working in the 1980s, such as Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, and Sherrie Levine, Sherman adopts the postmodern stance that photography is a strategy for revealing the cultural constructions we designate as truth. Counter to classic modernist notions of the photograph as formal icon or truthful document, the fictional narratives of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills and the feminine conditions they construct suggest that photographic production, like all forms of representation, is ideologically motivated.
In many stills, Sherman engages with another theme of postmodern practice and theory of the 1980s: the camera is not a neutral device but an ideological apparatus that frames and constructs a particular viewpoint. In this case, Sherman seems to have consciously manipulated the image to emphasize the controlling (implicitly male) gaze of the viewer. As a number of writers have pointed out, the young women in the Untitled Film Stills series reenact cinematic codes of femininity of the 1950s. Other Stills portray such constructs of femininity as the brutalized victim, the vamp or hooker and the bourgeois hausfrau.
Other writers have suggested that Sherman's role-playing exposes femininity itself as a masquerade, and is thus a fiction rather than an absolute identity. The masquerade of femininity enacted by Sherman's women, as well as the role-playing of Sherman herself, recall another postmodern tenet: that the self is a matrix of shifting identities rather than a unified whole.
ordem das fotos: untitled movie stills nr. 3,10,5,50,11,13
texto adaptado do site do Allen Memorial Art Museum.
CINDY SHERMAN
Untitled Movie Stills
Cindy Sherman transforms herself into a disquieting image of 1950s B-movie femininity in this photographic performance. Engaged with issues current in the early 1980s under the rubric of postmodernism, the work investigates the role of photography in the construction of the unified self, and makes explicit the power relations provoked by the act of looking.
The photographs belong to Sherman's serie of sixty-five grainy, black-and-white photographs reminiscent of "film noir" movie stills. Although Sherman is both model and photographer in these works, these images are not autobiographical. She photographs herself in various guises of stereotypical femininity, each a moment in a larger implied narrative.
Along with many artists working in the 1980s, such as Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, and Sherrie Levine, Sherman adopts the postmodern stance that photography is a strategy for revealing the cultural constructions we designate as truth. Counter to classic modernist notions of the photograph as formal icon or truthful document, the fictional narratives of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills and the feminine conditions they construct suggest that photographic production, like all forms of representation, is ideologically motivated.
In many stills, Sherman engages with another theme of postmodern practice and theory of the 1980s: the camera is not a neutral device but an ideological apparatus that frames and constructs a particular viewpoint. In this case, Sherman seems to have consciously manipulated the image to emphasize the controlling (implicitly male) gaze of the viewer. As a number of writers have pointed out, the young women in the Untitled Film Stills series reenact cinematic codes of femininity of the 1950s. Other Stills portray such constructs of femininity as the brutalized victim, the vamp or hooker and the bourgeois hausfrau.
Other writers have suggested that Sherman's role-playing exposes femininity itself as a masquerade, and is thus a fiction rather than an absolute identity. The masquerade of femininity enacted by Sherman's women, as well as the role-playing of Sherman herself, recall another postmodern tenet: that the self is a matrix of shifting identities rather than a unified whole.
ordem das fotos: untitled movie stills nr. 3,10,5,50,11,13
texto adaptado do site do Allen Memorial Art Museum.
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