Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and artist who plays on the female stereotypes. Her Untitled Film Stills includes over seventy black and white images which were made between 1977 and 1980. This series embodies the disguise, mystery, voyeurism and vulnerability in which women hold. Her work could be viewed as feeding into the ‘Male Gaze’ due to a handful of her images being staged in a heterosexual perspective which could be viewed as sexualising women. Cindy Sherman embodied many different roles while creating her photo series, she styled many of the models clothes, hair and makeup wile also being her own model.

Cindy Sherman has always experimented with different identities. Just after she moved to New York, she produced her Untitled Film Still series (1977–80) , in which she used disguises and photographed herself in many different location settings with a conscious understanding of what props she wanted to use to create scenes which resembled those from mid-20th-century movies. These images rely on female characters such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naïf. Cindy Sherman used cinematic understanding to structure these photographs. The untitled series immediately became topics of conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain some of her best-known work.

https://artlead.net/journal/modern-classics-cindy-sherman-untitled-film-stills/

Image Analysis:

Many pictures of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills show situations that can come across as uncomfortable, promiscuous since it show a depicted woman in a vulnerable position. Cindy Sherman confronts people with the negative implications of the way the media depicts women especially in movies through the way she positions herself in her images which leaves an open door for men to objectify the female body. The male gaze is often present in her but she subtly changes the perspectives, expressions, and circumstances.