"It" Girl: Cindy Sherman

A photograph of Cindy Sherman by Richard Burbridge

Cindy Sherman, is a famous and well respected modern Amercian photographer. Her works deal with a diverse range of challenging and important issues relating to modern life such as the social depiction and stigmatisation of women, the role of the artist, the role of the media and the nature of the creation of art. What makes her work particularly unique is the fact that Cindy Sherman utilises herself as the model for all her photographs. As such the artist evocatively becomes the vehicle for her artistic expression.  As stated on her website, Sherman "manipulates the notion of portraiture through the use of conventional portrait signs including the setting of the figure against a neutral background."

In 2008, Cindy Sherman was interview by David Hershkovits, founder of PAPER Magazine. I found the comments Sherman made in regards to the women in her work particularly fascinating.
Here is an extract from the interview:

On why she chose to focus on society women for a portrait series:
I liked these older women trying to look good and dignified and over-the-top. Just the idea os these rich ladies who pose in ball gowns in their living rooms with their toddles - it just looks so ridiculous.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008.

On how she got into character:
The mental state is more important because I really want a character to come through. I started to think about some of the characters - how they're older women and if they are successful, maybe they're not really that happy. Maybe they've been divorced, or they're in an unhappy marriage, by because of the money, they're not going to get out [Laughs]. Thats what I was thinking - that there's something more below the surface that you can't really see.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled. 2008

On the difficulty of photographing herself: 
What gets harder is the goal of trying to seem somewhat different. And that was another reason why, when I was doing some of these characters, I wasn't that happy with them, because I thought they reminded me of other characters I've done. Or I saw too much of myself in some of them. To me, it's a little scary when I see myself. And it's especially scary when I see myself in these older [society] women. After the first six I thought, 'This is great, this is so easy - I have a whole new category of women to explore.' It was kind of scary how easily I could mamke myself look so much older. But that was always the case in the work. Not about age, but I realized how easily I could look this way or that way, and it was kind of scary - like your life could have been completely different if one little thing was different.

For the whole interview, click here.