The Work of Cindy Sherman :: Photography Photographer

No other artist has constantly made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to correct call her works self-portraits. She has trans throw and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, unvarying young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form pretty tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Shermans photography is part of the culture and investigation of internal and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970s. It has been said that, The hatful of her workhas been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections (Sobieszek 229). Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman grew up in suburban Huntington Beach on Long Island, the youngest of five children and had a constant American childhood. She was very self-involved, found of costumes, and given to spending hours at the mirror, play with makeup (Schjeldahl 7). Cindy Sherman attended the state University College at Buffalo, New York, where she first started to create art in the medium of painting. During her college years, she painted self-portraits and realistic copies of images that she saw in photographs and magazines. Yet, she became less, and less inte recessed in painting and became increasingly interested in conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, and film alternatives (Sherman 5). Shermans very first introductory photography class in college was a complete failure for she had diff iculties with the technological aspects of reservation a print. After her disastrous first attempt in photography, Sherman sight Contemporary Art, which had a profound and lasting effect on the rest of her artistic career (Thames and Hudson 1). Shermans first assignment in her photography class was to photograph something which gave her a problem, thus, Sherman chose to photograph her self naked. While this was difficult, she wise to(p) that having an idea was the most important factor in creating her art, not so much the technique that she used.