Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director best known for her conceptual portraits. Some of her work has been displayed in French Vogue and also Harper's Bazaar. I personally like her work as it is interesting and unique. Some of photographs are self portraiture yet she looks different in each of them, so it really makes the viewer think about the photograph. I like this specific photograph above as the background is fairly basic - a brick wall and a lamp, however the model is looking away and it makes the viewer think about what she is looking at. In a lot of Cindy Sherman photographs, she is looking away from the camera at something beyond the camera, which is an interesting and repeated technique throughout her work. This photograph is from a collection called 'untitled film stills' in which she is the model in all of them. She didn't title the photographs to preserve their ambiguity. They are all shot in black and white and were taken between 1977-1980.

For my final outcome, I think that her work will be inspirational as I am planning to do self portraiture combined with Andy Warhol's photobooth technique. I particularly like the idea of the black and white images as they create more shadows and tones within the image, making them more effective. I also like how the model in the image seems distracted, or perhaps doesn't know that the photograph is being taken - or it is supposed to look like that to the viewer. This makes the photograph look more like a snapshot rather than a posed image, and I personally really like this technique.

What is interesting about Cindy Sherman is that she does everything for her photographs - the photographer, the model, the makeup artist, the wardrobe 'director', hair stylist etc... so the work is purely her own with no help from others, which I find very inspiring. This is what I have been doing for my own photographs this project. Some of her photographs are high fashion, yet some of hers are more classic like the photograph above - this shows interesting variety for the artist.