Alone Time- Photo Series

Cindy Sherman- Untitled Film Still #62

"Model"

"Worry"

Cindy Sherman – Untitled Film Still #12, 1978

"Comfort"

Cindy Sherman – Untitled Film Still #14, 1978

"Thinking"

   

Cindy Sherman – Untitled Film Still #16, 1978

I recreated Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills because it was an empowering series. During this period of her photography in the 1900s, the roles of the photographs were influenced by Hollywood B Movies, Film noir. This series showed women doing everyday tasks like working, running errands, and living in society. The message in the series is the representation of femininity, she dressed up in dresses and heels and wears makeup which shows the feminine in the female. Her inspiration for my self-portraits was to help me think about myself and who I became as a person, in a sense of worry, and change in my life. The picture of me sitting in the chair was a very vulnerable moment for me because when I was looking at the photo after it was taken that this is who I am, this is the person I became, and I've changed so much as a person. This was more of a self-reflection portrait for me looking back at the pictures taken to show myself this is who I am. The New York Times article, The Ugly Beauty of Cindy Sherman states “The photographs are not self-portraits, nor do they depict her fantasies. She uses herself because it’s simpler, she says. She can push herself harder than any model, and she can avoid small talk.” Cindy Sherman worked alone she was a solo artist that enjoyed playing these roles by herself, she changes herself into the different possibilities of women and changes their perspective on it. In the article Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills her groundbreaking self-portraits she states “The characters weren’t dummies; they weren’t just airhead actresses. They were women struggling with something, but I didn’t know what. The clothes make them seem a certain way, but then, you look at their expression, however slight it may be and wonder if maybe ‘they’ are not what the clothes are communicating. I wasn’t working with a raised ‘awareness’, but I definitely felt that the characters are questioning something – perhaps being forced into a certain role.” Sherman says all the characters she played in the photographs, and she witness in Hollywood aren’t just objects that should just be looked at, she says people just go straight to what a female is wearing and how she looks from the bottom they never look at the face. In her series she has all the women in the picture upset like there is a bother, like something is wrong, in society people don’t notice how the female face is or the expression she is giving out, a woman's face could look lifeless in a sense where she is tired, and society will only care about what she is wearing or how she looks like. The article The Cindy Sherman Effect says, “Sherman’s coup was to cast herself as subject matter, making each of her staged characters the star of an implicit narrative.” Sherman had a way to make every character in her series the main character without the person in the picture realizing they were the main character all of the pictures she takes the character is always in the middle but looking away from the camera in a sense the viewer is looking at them and they are looking away from them.