Cindy Sherman (b. 1954)

"Since Sherman's characters in the Untitled Film Stills are not specified, we are free to construct our own narratives for these women. Sherman encourages our participation by suggesting, through the deliberate nature of her poses, that she is the subject of someone's gaze. The voyeuristic nature of these images and their filmic associations encourage a psychoanalytical reading of these works as illustrations of Laura Mulvey's renowned 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' which describes the image of women onscreen as the subject of the controlling male gaze and the object of masculine desire. Sherman's Untitled Film Stills not only imply our own and the camera's gazes but at times hint at the presence of another person in the room with her..." (A. Cruz, "Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks: Twenty Years of Cindy Sherman", in Cindy Sherman - Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998-2000, p. 3).