Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #13 1978

June 26 September 2, 1997 In December 1995, The Museum of Modern Art acquired all sixty-nine black-and-white photographs in Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series. This insured that this landmark body of work was preserved in its entirety in a single public collection. The series has been exhibited as a whole only once before. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977, when she was twenty-three. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stillsor perhaps like publicity pixpurporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen (#3) and lounging in the bedroom (#6). On to something, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the luscious librarian (#13, at left), the domesticated sex kitten (#14), the hotblooded woman of the people (#35), the ice-cold sophisticate (#50), and others. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichs. Other artists had drawn upon popular culture, but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real onesthose 8-by-10-inch glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it is not real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The sixty-nine solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar Americathe period of Sherman's youth, and the ground-zero of our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick, and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp. As Warhol said, "She's good enough to be a real actress."

This exhibition is sponsored by Madonna.

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills was organized by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography. The preceding text was excerpted from his commentary in The Museum of Modern Art's 1995-96 Annual Report.

2008: Uma fotografia da norte-americana Cindy Sherman foi vendida por US$ 902.500, o segundo preo mais alto pago por uma obra dessa artista em um prego, de acordo com a casa de leiles Christies. O valor do ltimo lance oferecido pela foto de Sherman "Untitled Film Still 13", que mostra a prpria fotgrafa pegando um livro de uma estante, superou as previses da Christies, que havia calculado sua venda por um preo entre US$ 300 mil e US$ 500 mil. A empresa arrecadou um total de US$ 6,5 milhes, em um nico leilo dedicado arte

contempornea e do ps-guerra, com uma seleo de obras de autores como Robert Rauscheberg, Yves Klein, David Salle, Chris Ofili e Jeff Koons. EFE 2009: Os auto-retratos de Cindy Sherman constituem o objeto da anlise de Annateresa Fabris, no ensaio "Cindy Sherman ou de alguns esteretipos cinematogrficos e televisivos". A artista norte-americana, segundo a autora, discute a construo dos esteretipos femininos na cultura contempornea, atravs da encenao, apresentada em diferentes sries de trabalhos da artista, impregnados com a presena de personas que lanam mo de u ma indumentria visual prpria dos papis femininos veiculados pelas mdias, tais como o cinema e a televiso. Atravs de tais performances, as noes de representao e auto-representao so discutidas, uma vez que a identidade se apresenta, nas sries fotogrficas, como encenao. Assim, segundo Annateresa Fabris, "Sherman afirma o domnio da linguagem", pois faz da fotografia, como diz Joan Fontcuberta, "uma forma de reinventar o real, extrair o invisvel do espelho e revel-lo".