Underexposed

 

Underexposed

 

Untitled, from the Untitled Film Stills series


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Object Details


Artist/Maker

Cindy Sherman, American, born 1954

Date

1979, printed 1989

Medium

Dye coupler print

Dimensions

Please contact the Museum for more information

Credit

Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection

Accession #

1995.98.8

Image Copyright

© Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures

Description

Cindy Sherman has used self-portraiture as a strategy to interrogate representations of identity, gender, and mass culture. In her breakout series Untitled Film Stills, she photographed herself in varied guises inspired by generic Hollywood depictions of female characters: the bereft housewife, the sultry vamp, the wide-eyed ingénue. She challenges traditional understandings of photography and self-portraiture and exposes mass media’s constructed norms and ideas about femininity. Although she shot the original series in black and white as a nod to mid-twentieth-century B-grade black-and-white films, she also reprised the themes in color works like this one.