Every photograph in Cindy Sherman's most famous series, "Untitled Film Stills" (1977 to 1980), shows the same woman in a different role. She is a blonde housewife in a kitchen. She is a woman in sunglasses staring into the middle distance on a city street. She is a young woman alone in a hotel room, looking toward a door that is not in the frame. Each image looks like a still from a 1950s or 1960s European or American art film. Each is entirely fictional. No such film exists. The woman in every image is Cindy Sherman herself, and "she" is never really Cindy Sherman at all.
This sleight of hand, using her own body as the raw material for an investigation of how women are represented in popular visual culture, is the central strategy of one of the most influential artistic careers of the past fifty years. Sherman has produced no paintings, no sculptures, and no photographs in which she herself is not a performer. She is photographer, director, costume designer, makeup artist, and model simultaneously, and yet the work is not autobiography. It is the opposite: a systematic examination of how identity is constructed through role, costume, and context rather than inherent selfhood.
The Untitled Film Stills: One Body, Many Women
Cindy Sherman in Amsterdam, 2009. Unlike her artwork, where she disappears into roles, this photograph shows the artist herself. The contrast between Sherman as a person and Sherman as her constructed characters is central to her project. Photo by Viola Renate. Image: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sherman began "Untitled Film Stills" while still a student at Buffalo State College and completed it in New York over three years. The series eventually comprised 69 black-and-white photographs, all nominally 8 x 10 inches, each depicting a fictional female character in a specific setting. The titles are purely numerical, giving no information about the character, the setting, or the emotional situation depicted.
The women in "Untitled Film Stills" are familiar without being specific. They exist in the territory of visual cliche: the vulnerable woman, the career woman, the housewife, the femme fatale. Each image reproduces the visual grammar of European art cinema or Hollywood B-pictures with enough fidelity that the viewer's brain immediately supplies a narrative context that is not actually there. You think you recognize the film the still comes from, but it does not exist. What you are recognizing is a genre, a convention, a way of looking at women that cinema had produced so consistently that it had become invisible.
This is Sherman's subject: not women, but representations of women. Not identity, but the materials from which identity is assembled. By making herself every character, she simultaneously reveals that these characters are constructions and implicates herself and the viewer in that construction. MoMA acquired the complete series in 1995 for approximately one million dollars, and in 2011, Christie's sold "Untitled #96" (1981) for $3.89 million, setting the auction record for a photograph at that time. The series is now widely considered one of the most influential bodies of work in late 20th century art.
For the connection between Sherman's performance-based practice and performance art more broadly, our guide to performance art and its history places her work in the context of body-based art practices that developed in parallel during the same period.
History Portraits: Sherman Inhabits the Old Masters
Installation view of the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2020. The retrospective traced five decades of Sherman's practice, from the earliest film stills through the most recent digital work. Image: CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In the late 1980s, Sherman shifted scale and ambition dramatically. The "History Portraits" series (1988 to 1990) presented Sherman in costumes and poses directly referencing Old Master paintings: Raphael Madonnas, Flemish burgher portraits, Baroque allegorical figures. The photographs are large, richly colored, and technically elaborate, with prosthetic noses, ears, chins, and artificial breasts applied to Sherman's own face and body to produce figures that are and are not human in equal measure.
The effect is profoundly uncomfortable. The references to canonical European art history are clear enough to create recognition, but the exaggerated, grotesque prosthetics break the illusion at the same moment they establish it. Sherman is not impersonating specific paintings. She is exposing the artificiality that underlies all representation, including that of the revered Western tradition. The great Madonnas and saints of European painting were themselves performances: historical individuals dressed up, posed, and recorded in roles that served the social and religious functions of their patrons. Sherman makes this visible by turning the same process back on itself.
Fashion Photography Turned Inside Out
Vogue, Artforum, and Interview commissioned Sherman to produce fashion photography during the 1980s and 1990s, and the results consistently undermined the genre's premises. Fashion photography exists to make clothing desirable and its wearer aspirational. Sherman's fashion work produced dirty, grotesque, or disturbing images in which the clothing was incidental and the psychological states of the characters were foregrounded in ways that actively resisted aspiration.
In images made for fashion designer Comme des Garcons, Sherman appeared as aging, heavily made-up women whose relationship to the clothes they were wearing was ambiguous at best. These were not advertisements for the clothes. They were investigations of the cultural pressures and desires that fashion photography normally serves without acknowledging. The magazines and designers who commissioned them received exactly what they asked for in technical terms, and something entirely different in intention.
This approach, using the forms and contexts of commercial visual culture against themselves, connects Sherman's work to the broader tradition of appropriation art that developed alongside Postmodernism in the 1980s. Artists including Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine all worked with similar strategies of taking existing images or cultural conventions and reframing them to reveal what they normally conceal.
Later Work: Aging, Clowns, and Social Media
Cindy Sherman at a public event, 2009. Sherman rarely appears as herself in her artwork, making her public appearances a striking contrast to the constructed characters she inhabits in her photographs. Image: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sherman has continued to extend her range significantly through the 2000s and beyond. Her "Clowns" series (2003 to 2004) showed elaborately made-up figures whose cheerfulness reads as menace or sadness, reflecting on performance as a social mask rather than a creative achievement. The "Society Portraits" (2008) presented aging, wealthy women whose careful self-presentation through clothing, makeup, and posture simultaneously affirms and exposes the anxieties around female aging in privileged social contexts.
In 2024, Sherman announced her departure from Metro Pictures, the gallery that had represented her since the beginning of her career, signaling a new chapter. Her recent work has used Instagram and social media aesthetics as the context for self-portraits that manipulate her appearance through filters and digital editing in ways that mirror what millions of everyday users do for self-presentation. A major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2024 traced five decades of her practice, from the earliest film stills through the most recent digital work, and confirmed what has been clear for some time: that Sherman's investigation of constructed identity has only become more relevant as the tools for identity construction have become universal. The tools have changed. The question has not.
Why Sherman Still Matters
Sherman's work addresses questions that have become more urgent, not less, in the decades since "Untitled Film Stills." The constructed nature of identity, the role of visual media in producing templates for how women are supposed to look, feel, and behave, and the relationship between self-representation and authenticity are questions that social media, filtered selfies, and algorithmic image culture have made into the central anxiety of contemporary visual life.
Sherman's career demonstrates that asking these questions through photographic images, rather than through writing or theory, creates a different kind of understanding. She does not describe the problem. She makes you experience it. You look at "Untitled Film Stills" and find yourself automatically supplying narratives and characters that do not exist, and in doing so, you discover the extent to which your own visual cognition has been shaped by cinematic conventions you absorbed without choosing them.
That is the fundamental operation of conceptual art at its most effective: using the viewer's own trained responses as the material of the work. For more on how artists have used the body as their primary artistic medium, our guide to performance art covers the parallel tradition of live, time-based body art that informed Sherman's practice. And for a broader view of how Postmodernism changed what contemporary art can be about, our guide to the evolution of art styles provides essential context.
Final Thoughts
Cindy Sherman has made the same photograph for fifty years: a picture of a woman who is never the woman she appears to be, never the woman you expect to find, and always Cindy Sherman using her own face and body to ask who we think women are supposed to be and why. That the question still feels urgent after all this time is not because Sherman has failed to answer it. It is because the visual culture that produces the problem has not stopped producing it.
If you have not seen "Untitled Film Stills" in person, the series is held by MoMA and has been widely exhibited. Standing in a room with all 69 images simultaneously is a different experience from viewing them one at a time: the accumulation of invented women, all from the same face, makes the construction visible in a way that individual images cannot. What do you find most unsettling about Sherman's work? Share your thoughts in the comments.
