The American artist Cindy Sherman is one of the leading representatives of staged photography. In her photographs she uses her body as a vehicle for creating all sorts of roles and staging masquerades. By combining the roles of film director, main protagonist and photographer, she blurs the strict dividing lines between posing and viewing, between object and subject. Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, a suburb of New York, in 1954. She attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where she originally studied painting before switching to photography. During this time she got to know the artist Robert Longo. Together with Longo and Charles Clough she founded the independent art gallery Hallwalls. After graduating in 1976 Cindy Sherman decided to settle in New York, where she still lives and works. In the history of art the work of Cindy Sherman stands for a radically new way of defining the possibilities of contemporary photography.

Parodic, grotesque, and sometimes brutal, her works present a spectrum of figures based on cultural and social stereotypes in a way that calls into question the visual codes of their presentation in advertising, cinema and classical painting. The main focus is on the contemporary image of woman and the aesthetic it conveys.

© Cindy Sherman