CINDY SHERMAN (B. 1954)

With consummate finesse and intelligence, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills mine stereotypes in compellingly persuasive narratives or visual codes, drawing from a trove of filmic practices-lighting, cropping, framing, camera angle-as well as bodily conventions-clothing, gestures, and poses. Among the most technically persuasive of the Sherman's iconic series is Untitled Film Still (#32) (1979), where the face, neck, shoulders, and arms of a Sherman's character swim out of the darkness toward the illumination of a single match, with which she is about to light her cigarette. The ideality of this single shot is so fully reliant on the lighting of the cigarette that the moment would be lost with a single switch of a light. In a single moment Sherman captures the essential portrayl of femme fatales in film noir. She overlays a sense of Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Lucille Ball, Rita Hayworth, Ann Savage and Jane Greer to name several, to create an image of all of them, and therefore none of them specifically. Sherman creates a perfect "copy for which there is no original" as the critic Rosalind Krauss succinctly describes the as one underlying premise of her best work.