Untitled (Film Still #7)

Artist Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954)

Date1978

Mediumgelatin silver print

Dimensionsimage: 23.9 × 18.9 cm (9 7/16 × 7 7/16 in.)
sheet: 25.3 × 20.3 cm (9 15/16 × 8 in.)

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineCharlotte E.W. Buffington Fund

Terms

Object number1995.65

Label TextSherman’s work combines performance, photography, and a keen awareness of stereotypes assigned to women in popular culture. Using cheaply sourced props and makeup, she adopts the guise of another person, usually a woman. Untitled (Lucille Ball), captured in a photo booth in 1975 and printed later, remains the only known work in which she fashioned herself into a specific, identifiable living person. After she moved to New York City in 1977, Sherman began her series of Untitled Film Stills. She used the production design techniques of Hollywood to evoke cinematic tropes such as lonely housewife, independent career girl, and intoxicated starlet as seen here in Film Still #7. She skillfully assumes these characters with enough specificity to conjure a stereotype but imbued the scenes with enough ambiguity that viewers could create their own narratives—and by extension films—through the photographs. Cindy Sherman began making her now-landmark series, Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), when she was 23 and it soon established her as a major voice in contemporary art. In those 69 black and white photographs, Sherman quoted the look of film stills from the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on an array of female types—all are Sherman photographing herself in various costumes and disguises. In Untitled Film Still #7, with garter exposed and martini in hand, Sherman looks up behind sunglasses and feigns surprise at an off-screen presence. Sherman purposely conceived her fictional film stills as unmistakable yet ambivalent, preferring to emulate shots that “were always the ones in-between the action” and characters whose emotions were “almost expressionless.” In the process of questioning the cinematic portrayal of women, Sherman exposed the pervasiveness of female stereotypes populating the cultural landscape and helped unleash a generational examination of representations of gender within society’s institutions and in the mass media. Provenance(Scheinbaum & Russek, Sante Fe, NM); 1995, purchased by the Worcester Art Museum.

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