Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman works alone in her studio, acting as photographer, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe department and model. She appears in almost all of her pictures, yet she insists they are not self-portraits. “Sometimes I disappear,” she has said.

She went to Buffalo State to study painting, found it limiting and switched to photography. She was already dressing up in thrift-store outfits, and a fellow student, Robert Longo, encouraged her to photograph the process. Between 1977 and 1980, living in Manhattan, she made the Untitled Film Stills: small black-and-white prints in which she plays women from film noir and B-movies, a librarian, a seductress, a hillbilly. None has a title, so the story stays open. The Museum of Modern Art bought the series in 1995.

Colour and larger formats came next. Centerfolds (1981) twists the magazine centre spread. In History Portraits (1988 to 1990) she restages European portrait paintings. Later she turned herself into clowns, and then into wealthy older women for the Society Portraits (2008). These days she also posts heavily edited selfies on Instagram.

French visitors have had a few chances to see her work in person: a touring retrospective stopped in Bordeaux in 1999, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris gave her a major show in 2020. Start with Untitled Film Still #21, shot out on the streets of New York and picked by Time as one of the hundred most influential photographs. It looks like a scene from a film you have seen. That film does not exist.