In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking “Untitled Film Stills.” Over three years, the series grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the “Untitled Film Stills”—resembling publicity pictures made on movie sets—read like an encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s “Stills” are entirely fictitious; they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. While the pictures can be appreciated individually, much of their significance comes in the endless variation of identities from one photograph to the next. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.
“When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they’re decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.”
“Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an
interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves
in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great
educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they
are propaganda machines.”
