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Perhaps no artist is better known for using costumes for role playing than Cindy Sherman. An American photographer and film director known for her conceptual self-portraits.  Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. For example, in her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. Sherman's most recent series, dated 2003, features her as clowns. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines. Throughout her career, Sherman has appropriated numerous visual genres—including the film still, centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image—while disrupting the operations that work to define and maintain their respective codes of representation. In addition to numerous group exhibitions, her work is also the subject of solo exhibitions. 

In response to cuts to NEA funding and attempts to censor photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, in 1989 Sherman produced the Sex series. These photographs featured pieced-together medical dummies in flagrante delicto and sex positions. Like much of Sherman's work, many critics find the series both disturbing and funny. Many art critics consider Sherman to be not only the most successful female photographer of the modern era, but one of the most successful artists of either genders in the late twentieth century with as much influence on younger artists as did Andy Warhol in his era.


Feeling pigeonholed by the feminist discourse that surrounded her work, Sherman gradually dispensed with representations of the female, often removing herself from the picture and moving toward more fantastic and lurid imagery, as in her Fairy Tales and Disasters series from the mid- to late 1980s. The ever-increasing market for her photographs also prompted this turn, challenging her to attempt to create work that was “unsaleable” due to its visceral depictions of vomit, body parts, and grotesque fairy tales. Simultaneously, she instilled the works with a heightened sense of artifice created by garish colors and gaps that reveal the fiction behind the illusion.

Pantheon has recently published Cindy Sherman, a collection of 39 black-and-white and 50 color photographs. This publication by a relatively young artist (she was born in 1954) is an unusual event: monograph collections of photographs, even by the field's elders, are risky commercial ventures and the books often end up remaindered in a year or two. However, Cindy Sherman has cannily succeeded in presenting her work as art and not photography, as Peter Schjeldahl writes in the Introduction, her work is presented "not as 'art photography' but as art, period."