Personal Background
Cindy Sherman born January 19, 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, U.S, Sherman grew up on Long Island, New York. In 1972 she enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo and majored in painting, later switching her major to photography. She graduated from SUNY in 1976 and in 1977 began work on Untitled Film Stills, one of her best-known series. The series of 8 × 10-inch black-and-white photographs featuring Sherman in a variety of roles is reminiscent of film noir and presents viewers with an ambiguous portrayal of women as sex objects. Sherman stated that the series was “about the fakeness of role-playing as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy.” She continued to be the model in her photographs, donning wigs and costumes that evoke images from the realms of advertising, television, film, and fashion and that, in turn, challenge the cultural stereotypes supported by these media
Style
Cindy Sherman is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.
Philosophy
Cindy Sherman, uses her self, other models and feminism to guide her and give her enlightenment to her pictures.
Sherman turned to photography toward the end of the 1970s in order to explore a wide range of common female social roles, or personas. Sherman's many variations on the methods of self-portraiture share a single, notable feature: in the vast majority of her portraits she directly confronts the viewer's gaze, no less in the case of posed sex dolls, as though to suggest that an underlying penchant for deception is perhaps the only "value" that truly unites us.
Sherman turned to photography toward the end of the 1970s in order to explore a wide range of common female social roles, or personas. Sherman's many variations on the methods of self-portraiture share a single, notable feature: in the vast majority of her portraits she directly confronts the viewer's gaze, no less in the case of posed sex dolls, as though to suggest that an underlying penchant for deception is perhaps the only "value" that truly unites us.
Influences
When I first looked at Cindy's work I was more disturb by the messiness of it and I was so confused by it. Looking at it closer and understanding what was being reflected in those pictures, I then began to fall in love with them. In Cindy's work there is a story behind all of the pictures. She portrays feminisms so well in her pictures and breaks the male oppression by only focusing on females. If I get into Photography I would try and replicate work like Cindy's.