If you follow art at all you already know that Cindy Sherman takes
pictures only of herself, but she always insists she doesn’t make
self-portraits. True enough—it would be more accurate to say that for
the past 35 years, she’s been producing a portrait of her times as they
flow through the finely tuned instrument of her baroque psyche. Again
and again in her spine-tingling retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) in New York City—it runs there from Feb. 26 to June 11, then
travels to San Francisco, Minneapolis and Dallas—you also discover she’s
made a portrait of you.
Growing up in a New York suburb, Sherman loved to play dress-up. In
1977, when she was 23 and just out of Buffalo State College, she started
playing it with a vengeance. For three years, she photographed herself
in costumes, wigs and settings that drew from the deep pool of movie
images in which we’re all immersed from childhood. In what eventually
grew to a series of 70 “Untitled Film Stills,” she took on the role of
career girl, housewife, siren and woman on the verge of a nervous
breakdown. Six years before Woody Allen got there, she became the Zelig
of the collective unconscious, the heroine with a thousand faces.