American Icons: Untitled Film Stills

These are snapshots of America’s collective unconscious.

Cindy Sherman grew up in the era when old movies filled our late nights. She wrote about going to a dinner party with her parents when she was a child, and ending up in the basement watchingRear Windowalone. As an artist in the 1980s, she began taking self-portraits in costumes and settings that called those old black-and-white movies to mind — they were “stills” for films that didn’t exist, but might have. She would change in the back of a van and emerge on the street as an ingnue, a movie star, a soon-to-be murder victim. In a media-saturated age,Untitled Film Stillssuggested that Sherman’s identity as a woman was constructed from other people’s narratives. They influenced a generation of artists who play with identity as a kind of performance. Photography curator Eva Respini sees her influence much wider than that.“The selfie is not about who you really are. It’s about how you look at best in the camera to your friends, creating a narrative of what you’re doing.”

Helene Winer took this still at Sherman’s direction. She remembers thinking, “Ooo, these are going to be the worst ones, the most terrible ones because she’s not doing anything.” Instead, Sherman looks like a glamorous Italian movie star fleeing thepaparazzi.

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 24, 1978

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 54, 1980

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Often called “the city girl,” this still centers Sherman in an ominous cityscape as if she just stepped off the bus from Kansas.

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 16, 1978

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 34, 1979

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 48, 1979

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)