Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #58

It goes without saying that most female photographers today are influenced by Cindy Sherman, whether consciously or not. The idea that she is the subject in nearly all of her work, without her photos being "self portraits," once really engaged questions about the meaning of "self" for me.

Personally, her work speaks to me more about anonymity than identity - a comparison that has become really important to my work. In any visual art, but most specifically photography, the image ceases to be a specific person and becomes a person (I recall Magritte's La trahison des images/The Treachery of Images). With this in mind I feel like Sherman's work, yes, is a photography of a character or of some constructed personality - but whether or not this is the case in all portraiture is a more interesting question.



Untitled (Woman in Sun Dress), 2003

Here more recent work just kind of freaks me out, maybe more or less than it's intended to.