Cindy Sherman is an American photographer who has been producing the famous untitled series of photos since the 70’s, since she was a young art student.
This massive body of work is not one continuous series but a series of short narratives, narratives about women and the way they are looked at, represented and desired.
All of it is untitled, uncredited and dispossessed , but each narrative has a communal name, a semantic prefix, which gives it a location but says nothing about the individual photo, like the address of a house means nothing without its place in a sequence of addresses. The series names, such as Rear Screen Projections, Untitled Film Stills, Centrefolds or Horizontals, etc These names gives the images back to society, back to the place of their origins, as they are all derivative, all are images of women with one women at their centre.
Sherman is the model in nearly all of them, the occupant in most of them, but she is never present. Each photo captures, in anonymity, a feminine role, a fair archetype, the danger of being (with) a woman – both for the feminine and masculine.
Sometimes she is in the guise of the Femme Fatal, sometimes the virtuous maiden, the socialite, the whore, the housewife, a movie star – all the things a women can be without being herself.
It has been said of Sherman that she tried to find herself in the vaporous representations of women in the media, but she always found these positions empty. Found herself…empty.
Sherman shot a series called Centrefold Untitled. It was meant to be a pastiche of pornography, an invasion of the male gaze that controls this form, that gaze that looks downward and beyond, forcing the women to look up, to plead and to touch – to be the empty centre of the composition, a place to insert male desire.
She succeeded in mimicking the light, the bottom of the well composition, but the effect was essentially the same. I am the wound you fuck. Do not look so surprised when I bleed.
Sherman tried to debase herself to save femininity, to martyr herself, but the camera took the place of the male violator. She was twice violated. Once by the camera and then twice by the man watching the camera watching her. She made the whole act autoerotic. She places her hand over her crotch. Caught before the moment she lifts her hem. Come inside with your eyes. The organs that count.
She is always caught before or after the moment, between the real and the simulation, between the gloss of the magazine and the dirt of life. Photography has always had the problem of having seams, of being seamy, when it attempts to capture the perversely normal. This is because it always stages the perverse. It premeditates taboo.
Sometimes she makes it work. Sometimes we recreate ourselves when we fuck another. We find another subject, another place to inhabit. Does it always matter if the other is human? Sometimes it can be a camera erect on a tripod. A silent, voyeuristic lover.
When an assault takes place, sometimes the assailant is silent. The whole thing becomes perverse when you introduce complicity.
Cindy Sherman was complicit.
She was accomplice.
She was accomplished.
