Another copy this work is located at collection of the modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, USA. .

Metro Pictures, New York / Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Rockers Island. Essen, Museum Folkwang, 2007 / Cindy Sherman. Silkeborg (Denmark), Museum Jorn, 2017 / Cindy Sherman. Bremen, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, 2018/19

Who’s That Girl? – On the Art of Being Someone Else

Few photographic series of the 1970s have become as deeply embedded in our visual memory as Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80). In 1977, shortly after moving from Buffalo to New York, Sherman made the first photograph in the celebrated series in the apartment she shared with Robert Longo. It laid the foundations for her artistic practice and grew into a group of 70 photographs over the following three years. Conceived in the traditional format of production stills, the black-and-white photographs depict Sherman in roles inspired by Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. These stills, originally made on film sets for promotional purposes, evoke familiar cinematic scenes that, on closer inspection, reveal their artificiality. They cannot be traced to any specific film, nor do they feature recognisable actresses. Instead, they draw on deeply ingrained stereotypes and, taken together, offer a commentary on the notions of femininity that shaped the cinema of the period.
Sherman belongs to the first American generation to grow up entirely with television. She has recalled spending hours in front of the screen as a child, watching “Million Dollar Movie” show the same film every evening for a week. At a dinner party hosted by her parents, she once watched Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” alone in the basement, fascinated by the lives unfolding in the windows opposite. Immersed in the flood of images produced by cinema, television and advertising during these years, Sherman began assembling an internal archive of characters at an early age. In the “Untitled Film Stills”, she casts herself as the leading actress in an imaginary cinematic repertoire, with scenes that recall films by Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni and Douglas Sirk. Sherman’s women are lonely, seductive, vulnerable, self-assured or on their guard. Almost invariably, they seem to be part of a story whose beginning and end remain withheld from us.
“Untitled Film Still #55” dates from 1980, the final year of the series, when Sherman moved her characters out of interiors and onto the streets, into the night. She photographed in the deserted streets of downtown Manhattan after business hours, around Fulton Street, deliberately choosing locations that resist precise identification. In #55, a young woman stands alone in a narrow alley at night. Has she just returned from a date, or is she fleeing someone following her through the darkness? The photograph derives its impact from the suspended state between these possibilities. Sherman employs the visual devices of cinema: lighting, cropping, framing and camera angle, as well as the conventions of bodily appearance, clothing, gesture and pose. The harsh flash pulls the figure out of the darkness; the wet pavement glistens, while a solitary streetlamp in the background hangs like a second, more distant moon. The blonde curly wig, double-breasted wool coat and handbag slung over her shoulder locate the scene in the cinema of the 1950s, while the civil defence shelter sign on the wall evokes Cold War America. Yet the woman’s gaze passes just beyond the camera, fixed on a point outside the frame that remains invisible to the viewer.

The “Untitled Film Stills” marked the beginning of the expansive, polyphonic encyclopaedia of human existence and social role-playing through which Cindy Sherman became one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since then, she has explored the many facets of human identity with an astonishing repertoire of costumes, wigs, prosthetics and props. Today, her photographs are represented in the world’s leading collections. As early as 1995, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the complete “Untitled Film Stills” series. The present work belongs to a select group of images that Sherman printed in a larger format and in an edition of only three, giving it a distinctive position within the series. CH