Cynthia Cindy Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has sought to raise challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art. Her photographs include some of the most expensive photographs ever sold. Sherman lives and works in New York.

Cindy Sherman was born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of five children.[2][3][4] Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island.

Sherman became interested in the visual arts at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. Frustrated with what she saw as the medium's limitations, she abandoned the form and took up photography. [T]here was nothing more to say [through painting], she later recalled. I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

Sherman has said about this time One of the reasons I started photographing myself was that supposedly in the spring one of my teachers would take the class out to a place near Buffalo where there were waterfalls and everybody romps around without clothes on and takes pictures of each other. I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this. But if we’re going to have to go to the woods I better deal with it early.’ Luckily we never had to do that.[5] She spent the remainder of her college education focused on photography. Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credits with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms.[6] While in college she also met Robert Longo, who encouraged her to record her process of dolling up for parties. Together with Charles Clough, Robert Longo and Sherman created Hallwalls, an arts center.

The center was a snapshot of Buffalo in the late 1970s, a city which had gained a reputation as a model laboratory for artists interested in dismantling boundaries between media. Besides Hallwalls and the wealth of classes and programs in the arts supplied by the two Buffalo campuses of the SUNY school system, Sherman was exposed to the contemporary art exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Media Studies Buffalo, the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts, and Artpark, in nearby Lewiston, N.Y., where she was privy to the fluid exchange of influences among the artists, curators and programmers working at all these venues and in all the exhibited media.[7] It was in Buffalo that Sherman also encountered the photo-based Conceptual works of artists Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper.[8]

Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress—and, of course, model.[9]

Early work
Bus Riders (19762000) is a series of photographs that feature the artist as a variety of meticulously observed characters. The photographs were shot in 1976 and are among the artist's earliest work but, like another series entitled Murder Mystery People, were not printed or exhibited until 2000. Sherman uses elaborate costumes and make-up to transform her identity for each image, but is photographed in a sparse, obviously staged setting with a wooden chair standing in for the bus seat. In her landmark 69-photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980; although the 1997 traveling MOCA retrospective included five straight-on head shots dated 1975), Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. When asked if she considers herself to be acting in her photographs, Sherman said, “I never thought I was acting. When I became involved with close-ups I needed more information in the expression. I couldn’t depend on background or atmosphere. I wanted the story to come from the face. Somehow the acting just happened.”[5]

Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist[citation needed], many of her photo-series, like the 1981 Centerfolds, call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines. When talking about one of her centerfold pictures Cindy stated, In content I wanted a man opening up the magazine suddenly look at it with an expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be. Looking at this woman who is perhaps a victim. I didn't think of them as victims at the time... But I suppose... Obviously I'm trying to make someone feel bad for having a certain expectation.[10]

In her work, Sherman is both revealed and hidden, named yet nameless.[editorializing] She explained to the New York Times in 1990, I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.[11] She describes her process as intuitive, and that she responds to elements of a setting such as light, mood, location, and costume, and will continue to change external elements until she finds what she wants. She has said of her process, I think of becoming a different person. I look into a mirror next to the camera…it’s trance-like. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens...When I see what I want, my intuition takes over—both in the 'acting' and in the editing. Seeing that other person that’s up there, that’s what I want. It’s like magic.”[5]

The Untitled Film Stills
The series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980, with which Cindy Sherman achieved international recognition, consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. The artist poses in different roles and settings (streets, yards, pools, beaches, and interiors),[12] producing a result reminiscent of stills typical of Italian neorealism or American film noir of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.[13] She avoided putting titles on the images to preserve their ambiguity.[14] Modest in scale compared to Sherman’s later cibachrome photographs, they are all 8 12 by 11 inches, each displayed in identical, simple black frames.[15] Sherman used her own possessions as props, or sometimes borrowed, as in Untitled Film Still #11 in which the doggy pillow belongs to a friend. The shots were also largely taken in her own apartment. The Untitled Film Stills fall into several distinct groups

The first six are grainy and slightly out of focus (e.g. Untitled #4), and each of the 'roles' appears to be played by the same blonde actress.

The next group was taken in 1978 at Robert Longo's family beach house on the north fork of Long Island. (Sherman met Longo during her sophomore year, and they were a couple until late 1979)

Later in 1978, Sherman began taking shots in outdoor locations around the city. E.g. Untitled Film Still #21

Sherman later returned to her apartment, preferring to work from home. She created her version of a Sophia Loren character from the movie Two Women. (E.g. Untitled Film Still #35 (1979))[7]

She took several photographs in the series while preparing for a road trip to Arizona with her parents. Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), also known as The Hitchhiker, was shot by Sherman’s father[16] at sunset one evening during the trip.

The remainder of the series was shot around New York, like Untitled #54, often featuring a blonde victim typical of film noir.

Sherman eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés. In December 1995, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired all sixty-nine black-and-white photographs in Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series[17] for an estimated $1 million.[18]

Later series
In addition to her film stills, Sherman has appropriated a number of other visual forms— the centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image. These and other series, like the 1980s Fairy Tales and Disasters sequence, were shown for the first time at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City.

During the 1980s Sherman began to use colour film, to exhibit very large prints, and to concentrate more on lighting and facial expression. It was with her series Rear Screen Projections, 1980, that Sherman switched from black-and-white to color and to clearly larger formats. CenterfoldsHorizontals, 1981, are inspired by the center spreads in fashion and pornographic magazines. The twelve photographs were initially commissioned—but not used by -- Artforum's Editor in Chief Ingrid Sischy for an artist's section in the magazine. Close-cropped and close up, they portray young women in various roles, from a sultry seductress to a frightened, vulnerable victim who might have just been raped.[19] About her aims with the self-portraits, Sherman has said Some of them I’d hope would seem very psychological. While I’m working I might feel as tormented as the person I’m portraying.”[5] In Fairy Tales, 1985, and Disasters, 1986–1989, Cindy Sherman uses visible prostheses and mannequins for the first time.[13] Provoked by the 1989 NEA funding controversy involving photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as well as the way Jeff Koonsmodelled his porn star wife in his Made in Heaven series,[16] Sherman produced the Sex series in 1989. For once she removed herself from the shots, as these photographs featured pieced-together medical dummies in flagrante delicto.

Between 1989 and 1990, Sherman made thirty-five much larger color photographs restaging the settings of various European portrait paintings of the fifteenth through early 19th centuries. Under the title History Portraits Sherman photographed herself in costumes flanked with props and prosthetics portraying famous artistic figures of the past, like Raphael’s La Fornarina, Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus and Judith Beheading Holofernes, or Jean Fouquet’s Madonna of Melun.[20][21] Between 2003 and 2004, she produced the Clowns cycle, where the use of digital photography enabled her to create chromatically garish backdrops and montages of numerous characters. Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters in Sherman’s 2008 untitled Society Portraits are not based on specific women, but the artist has made them look entirely familiar in their struggle with the standards of beauty that prevail in a youth- and status-obsessed culture. Her MoMA exhibition in 2012 also premiered a created photographic mural (2010–11) that represents the artist's first foray into transforming space through site-specific fictive environments. In the mural, Sherman transforms her face digitally, exaggerating her features through Photoshop by elongating her nose, narrowing her eyes, or creating smaller lips.

Based on an insert Sherman did for DashaZhukova's Garage magazine using vintage clothes from Chanel’s archive, a more recent series of large-scale pictures from 2012 depict outsized enigmatic female figures standing in striking isolation before ominous painterly landscapes the artist had photographed in Iceland during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and on the isle of Capri.