Cindy Sherman does not make self-portraits. This statement, which she has consistently maintained throughout her career, cuts to the heart of a fundamental misunderstanding about her work. When people see her face in her photographs—disguised, transformed, obscured, or made unrecognizable—they often assume they are looking at Sherman herself being documented. Instead, Sherman positions herself as a tool in a larger artistic enterprise: the exploration of identity, representation, and the constructed nature of the self. The distinction matters, and understanding it requires examining not just what Sherman photographs, but how and why she has approached the camera as a director, stylist, makeup artist, and performer all at once.
Early Life and Photography Discovery
Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman grew up on Long Island as the youngest of five children. She studied painting at State University of New York at Buffalo, hoping to make a career in that medium. But painting, she found, had limitations she could not work within. The turning point came when she enrolled in a photography course that failed to inspire her. Rather than abandon the medium, she retook the course with professor Barbara Jo Revelle—a decision that proved transformative. Revelle's teaching opened possibilities that painting had denied her. Sherman received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976 and immediately began making work that would eventually reshape contemporary photography.
Untitled Film Stills
Between 1977 and 1980, Sherman created a series of sixty-nine black and white photographs collectively titled Untitled Film Stills. These images appear to be stills extracted from forgotten 1950s and 1960s B-movies and European art films. In each photograph, a woman sits, stands, gazes, or moves through an interior or exterior space. The images are composed with the framing and lighting conventions of cinema. Many viewers assume they are reproductions of actual film stills, only later realizing that Sherman is the woman in every image, that she shot them herself using a mechanical timer, and that no film exists behind them.
Working with a small suitcase of props, wigs, and costumes, Sherman created characters from memory and imagination. She shot primarily in and around New York City, often in her own apartment or on nearby streets. The series reads like a catalogue of female archetypes: the anxious ingénue, the weary housewife, the mysterious European woman, the film noir victim. Each photograph is a performance frozen at a moment of ambiguous narrative tension. The viewer completes the story, imagining the scene before and after the exposure. By withholding narrative clarity, Sherman makes the viewer's interpretation part of the work itself. The series was her first major success, exhibited internationally and reproduced in art publications, establishing her as a significant new voice in conceptual photography.
The Question of Identity
A core tension runs through Sherman's career: the insistence that these are not self-portraits. She has stated plainly, "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself." This anonymity is intentional. Sherman explains: "I am trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me." The work is not about revealing Cindy Sherman; it is about using her body and face as a vehicle for exploring how identity is constructed, how representation works, and how viewers project meaning onto images of people.
The phrase "self-portrait" carries specific historical weight. It suggests introspection, revelation, the artist's attempt to depict their true self. Sherman's work does the opposite. "I'm trying to erase myself more than identify myself," she has said. By disguising her appearance through costume, makeup, prosthetics, and digital manipulation, she makes it impossible to locate an essential "Cindy Sherman" in the work. Instead, the photographs become investigations into how we construct identity through appearance, how we read the surface of the image for information about interiority, and how easily we can be misled by visual cues.
Expanding Beyond the Body
In the early 1980s, Sherman began experimenting with new directions. The Rear Screen Projections series (1980-1981) marked a transition to color photography and larger formats. The images featured Sherman, often nude or partially clothed, positioned against projected film stills. The disjuncture between the projected imagery and Sherman's body created new formal and conceptual possibilities.
The Centerfolds series, commissioned by Artforum magazine in 1981 but never published, presented fully clothed women in vulnerable moments and extreme close-ups. The women are isolated in urban or domestic settings, often in postures suggesting psychological distress or isolation. By framing the photographs vertically and printing them to poster scale, Sherman borrowed the format conventions of glossy magazine centerfolds while subverting their purpose—these are not images for male consumption but documents of female vulnerability and disconnection.
Color and Scale
The shift to color, begun in the early 1980s, allowed Sherman to work with new chromatic and psychological registers. Black and white film stills suggested cinema history and a specific historical period. Color introduced immediacy and, in some cases, artificiality. The large-scale prints—sometimes several feet across—transformed Sherman's images from small, intimate objects into commanding presences on the gallery wall. Viewing became a more physical, immersive experience. The enlarged scale also made evident every detail of makeup, costume, and surface, intensifying the artificiality and visual construction of the work.
History Portraits and Prosthetics
In 1989 and 1990, Sherman created the History Portraits series, in which she restaged famous paintings by Old Masters. Using extensive prosthetics, makeup, wigs, and costume, she embedded her own face and body into works by Caravaggio, Leonardo, Raphael, and others. The proposition was radical: inserting a contemporary female body into canonical art history. The prosthetics—sometimes grotesque, sometimes subtle—prevented the images from functioning as simple reenactments. Instead, they highlighted the gap between the original artwork and Sherman's contemporary intervention. The series asked: How is art history constructed? What does it mean to see a woman's face where the tradition expects a man's?
Sherman notably created this series without ever visiting a museum or seeing the original paintings. She worked from photographic reproductions in books, a methodological choice that underscored the series' conceptual concerns: we know art history through images, through reproduction and circulation, not necessarily through direct encounter with original objects.
In the early 1990s, the Sex Pictures series shifted focus entirely away from Sherman's body. Using mannequin parts and prosthetic elements in pseudo-pornographic tableaux, these images explored representation, desire, and objectification without the presence of a human performer. The images were shocking and visceral, created partly in response to arts funding cuts and censorship debates of the era. By abandoning her own body, Sherman demonstrated that her artistic concerns transcended self-representation; the work was always about systems of representation, not autobiography.
Digital Transformation
The Clowns series (2003-2004) marked Sherman's first extensive use of digital manipulation. Working with green screen technology and digital compositing software, Sherman created grotesque clown characters, digitally placed against artificial or manipulated backgrounds. The digital tools allowed unprecedented control over form and surface. Unlike the mechanical camera or even the darkroom, digital technology permitted Sherman to reshape her image with granular precision.
By 2008, the Society Portraits series applied digital techniques to depictions of wealthy, older women with evidence of cosmetic surgery. Sherman explored themes of aging, beauty standards, and the commercial pressures on female appearance. The works were simultaneously compassionate and satirical, presenting these women with frank attention to the surgical interventions visible on their faces and bodies.
In 2017 and beyond, Sherman's Instagram work took digital transformation further still. Using smartphone apps like Facetune and Perfect365, she created digitally modified selfies that distort and refigure her appearance with the same conceptual intent that animated the earlier work. The accessibility of digital tools—available to anyone with a phone—democratized the processes Sherman had pioneered. These images appeared on a platform designed for immediate, unmediated self-presentation, yet Sherman used the tools to make presentation as mediated and artificial as possible.
The Artist as Director
What unites Sherman's practice across five decades is her role as director, stylist, makeup artist, and performer operating simultaneously. The process is labor-intensive and meticulous. She controls every visual element: costume, makeup, lighting, framing, color, scale. This total control distinguishes her work from photography practice that relies on capturing spontaneous moments or on the photographer's ability to extract essence from a subject. Sherman constructs the image completely, using her own body as the primary material.
This total authorship and control—the sense that every visual choice in the photograph was deliberately made—is part of what makes the work conceptually coherent. The photograph is not a discovery of something pre-existing; it is a fabrication. By extension, identity itself is not discovered but fabricated through similar processes of costume, makeup, gesture, and presentation.
Sherman's evolution from black and white photographs using mechanical timers to large-format color prints to digital manipulation on smartphones reflects broader changes in photographic technology. Yet her concerns have remained constant: the constructed nature of representation, the unreliability of the photographic image, the way viewers project meaning onto depictions of people, and the contingency of identity. Her repeated insistence that these are not self-portraits stakes a claim about the nature of artistic practice itself. The camera can be pointed at the artist's own body without the result being introspective or autobiographical. The work can use the artist as a tool without the work being about the artist.
In 2014, a set of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills sold at Christie's for $6.77 million, making it one of the most expensive photographs ever sold. The market valuation reflects the work's conceptual significance and formal achievement. Yet Sherman remains suspicious of interpretation that collapses the work into autobiography. The photographs demand to be read as constructed images, artificial inventions, performances—not as windows into the artist's inner life or authentic self.
Explore More
To explore related conceptual approaches to identity and photography, examine the work of Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin, and David Lachapelle. Learn more about portrait photography techniques and conceptual practices in contemporary art.