Picture This

On Cindy Sherman

May 30, 2026

What is the picture of?

It is of the artist Cindy Sherman (born 1954) who is posing performatively. This image is called Untitled 402. All her work is untitled with a number. It is a chromogenic still from 2000. In the photograph Cindy is wearing a straw boater and a shirt that evokes the American flag with stars and stripes. Her make-up is over the top, she’s almost a cartoon. The image is from her series on Hollywood and The Hamptons, which examines the aesthetic of wealthy women and the culture present in these monied localities. She explores their anxieties around image and ageing.

The character has an uneasy smile, desperate to be accepted. Her hair isn’t as slick as a younger woman, she is probably middle-aged and her worth in society has decreased like an old dime. She knows this and hugs herself, expressing her vulnerability.

There is a sense of unease captured here. It is in the subject’s gaze and the directness of the pose. It is also comical, the make-up clown-like poking fun at way we dress and copy each other to fit in to our tribe or clique, or to appear fashionable or younger or even patriotic. A foretelling of the MAGA wife.

“I wish I could treat every day as Halloween and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.” Cindy Sherman

Why did you choose it?

Cindy Sherman is a genius at playing with identity and she has held a mirror up to the portrayal of women in art, media, and society analysing it in her practice over the last four decades. Sherman came to prominence in the 1970s as part of The Pictures Generation, a group of American artists who exhibited in New York in 1977 including Richard Prince and Louise Lawler who critiqued the world of mass media through their work.

Sherman began by dressing as B-movie heroines in different roles and taking her photograph, which she captured in 70 black and white images in the series Untitled Film Stills. Here she plays on the narratives of classic Hollywood and European art house films; posing as a lonely housewife, a vamp, an ingenue, and capturing herself in disguise, guerrilla style, in a format familiar to cinema-going audiences acquainted with the publicity still.

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still 10, 1978

These images were not taken from real films, but the brilliance of them lies in the fact that she created 70 scenarios illustrating just how much women are pigeonholed in the mass media. We can all read those images and by using herself as the subject she cleverly plays with the narrative, asking the viewer to think a little more deeply about it.

How many women have learnt what it is to be a housewife or a secretary through watching films. These roles are reflected to us, placing us in society. The, cool, composed Hitchcock heroine constantly under threat.

I’m 55 this week and for the last couple of birthdays identity has been right at the forefront of my mind. As a woman who is ageing, I wonder about my role in society and how this will play out over the next few years. Is my identity connected to my worth or can I simply disrobe and step out of character?

As a young woman, I played with my external appearance a lot. I dyed my hair red, blue, black, and blonde. I wore different types of clothes, and I explored how I wanted to be in the world and made a lot of effort before leaving the house. Now, I know who I am, and I am fairly relaxed about showing up, but the pressures around my identity are different.

We live in a youth-obsessed culture where plastic surgery is commonplace and conspicuous. Either because it is done badly, or even these days, if it is done well. We often know when someone’s had work. It can be a badge of honour. Just look at Demi Moore.

“I, as an older woman, am struggling with the idea of being an older woman.” Cindy Sherman

Cindy has also aged in public. She is the canvas for all her images and as she ages she felt it implausible for her to pose as a young starlet. At 62-years-old she created a series of Hollywood Divas, emulating actresses from the Golden Age like Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. Although the images are set in the 1960s the actresses still wear the fashions of the jazz age. There is a dignity in their poses. A reassurance and a confidence in their glamour. Cindy gets to try these characters on and I kind of like the idea of doing the same.

Sherman has a studio filled with costumes, wigs, make-up, and prosthetics. She creates the image and insists there are no autobiographical traits. She wants to obliterate any sense of herself to become them.

What is its significance?

Her later work has become quite brutal and almost lampoons the ageing woman – particularly the white, middle-class woman. With a series of macabre clowns, and satirical society portraits and perhaps most compellingly her latest images. Sherman has focused on the visage and created a collage mixing black and white imagery with colour to highlight parts of the face, which appear disfigured, and maligned. A grotesque composite face. A cut and paste face. I don’t feel when I look at her work that Sherman is judging women, it feels almost like a documentation of the standards placed on them. With such far reaching beauty ideals, easily accessible to the rich, what do women become?

Sherman also took to Instagram several years ago to post images of her as various characters. There was a looseness in these faces, sometimes distorted and often close to the camera. Less formal than her other work. We all now lead performative lives, and her practice has perhaps become our practice. We’re all our own starlets on our own streams. We’re all famous for 15 minutes and many of us are on a quest to be lauded for our beauty or aesthetic.

It’s hard being yourself. It’s easier to be someone else. At 55 though, I feel like I’m ready to be me – but the best version of me – pass me the hair dye.

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