Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

I was familiar with some of Cindy Sherman’s classic photos but SFMOMA’s Cindy Sherman Retrospective challenged my concepts of seeing and image. Years ago I learned how Sherman sets up the scenes props and takes photos with a remote shutter release cable. She captures women types who reside in our consciousness and in (white) mainstream in “Untitled Film Stills”: the young ingénue who arrives in the big city, the trampy prostitute who primps herself in the mirror, the B-film movie star sunbathing. She takes these unreal images which have become “real” in our collective consciousness and makes them both “unreal” and “real’ in the photos she presents. 

She continues this exploration with the depiction of historical and contemporary color images of women. What is striking for me is that although Sherman herself is the model who poses for these photos, they represent real women I have met in my life: like the middle age presenter from Arizona who has spent too much time in the sun evidenced by her baggy knees but is thoughtful in the coral accents to her muted blue dress and contemporary haircut.