Who is the Real Cindy Sherman?

Creating her own versions of familiar pop cultural characters and moments, Sherman toys with the ways in which media shapes our world, showing that there are in fact many versions of reality. Her earliest works, and perhaps her most iconic, became the Untitled Film Stills series, in which Sherman dressed herself as 50’s and 60’s film stars. Evocative of Hitchcock and other film noir classics, the 70 images in the series are enigmatic, hinting at a dramatic backstory that we can’t quite piece together.

Just as these works urge us to unravel the mystery of her characters, they lead us to ask the same questions of Sherman herself: Who is the woman behind the wigs, makeup and prostheses? Which version of Sherman is her truest self?

Sherman’s ability to change her appearance draws attention to the fact that most of the images surrounding us are manipulated, and the fact that the ways we present ourselves are their own kind of manipulation. Decades before celebrities were protesting the use of photoshop on models, Cindy Sherman was slyly poking fun at the way media distorts us.

Taking control of the way women are portrayed in art and the larger media world is a theme female artists have addressed for hundreds of years. Sherman tackles this feminist goal head-on in her large and diverse body of work. Engaging with themes of gender, age, and violence, the chameleon-like Sherman shows us that playing dress up is serious work, with serious implications.

With the advent of social media, questions about how our self-presentation reflects our identity have gotten more complicated, and Sherman has risen to the challenge of both engaging with and critiquing the age of the selfie. She has embraced Instagram, utilizing the (relatively) new technology of filters to her usual effect—creating beguiling altered self-portraits. On a format many feel gives a false impression of perfection, Sherman’s images are anything but, eschewing the flawless for the flat-out strange.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by cindy sherman (@cindysherman) on Feb 27, 2019 at 11:32am PST

Despite the prolific output on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, we don’t get any closer to nailing down who Cindy Sherman is, and perhaps that’s the point. The line between artifice and reality is so blurry that the line ceases to exist. Sherman’s life and work encourages us to embrace the multitudes we all contain, and to get comfortable with the unknown, within ourselves and others.

Cindy Sherman is at the National Portrait Gallery, London through September 15, 2019.