Last night I posted a mirror selfie to Instagram, telling Cindy Sherman. There were a lot of things to consider. Was the lighting and angle flattering? Did I get my good side?
“I find it fascinating,” he laughs. “The tradition of taking mirror selfies. You can see how a person poses, how they hold the camera. You can wear different clothes every day, but you’re always in your elevator. It becomes a conceptual photography project in a way. It’s funny.”
Discussing thirst traps with the woman who pioneered the selfie is an odd experience. We meet at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece, where an exhibition of Sherman’s earliest works has just opened. The air is 40 degrees and humid—even the Acropolis is closed for the afternoon. But the 70-year-old woman sitting across from me in an exhibition hall is effortlessly cool and elegant. She’s wearing a white Loewe T-shirt, white shorts and Prada shoes, her silver hair pulled back in a low ponytail. She’s soft-spoken, gentle and more understanding than you’d expect from someone of her caliber.
To say Sherman redefined portrait photography would be an understatement. Her signature practice of transforming herself from saints and endangered secretaries to grotesque clowns and elderly “luncheon ladies” (acting as her own makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist and director) has influenced countless contemporary portrait artists. She says her images are “lies” and that she is constantly trying to “erase” herself, adopting stereotypical female personas from TV, film and advertising.
Selfie culture may be damaging to young minds
“It’s not that far off from social media,” I say. Are we all projecting a distorted image these days? “I definitely think technology is changing the world right now,” she replies. “I can’t imagine growing up with social media. It must be so hard for a young person to navigate all that without feeling so self-conscious. Everyone wants to be a content creator or an influencer these days.”
Sherman’s first exhibition in Greece brings together more than 100 of his early works, including his groundbreaking series Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), dozens of black-and-white photographs inspired by ’50s and ’60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art cinema. Sherman found himself evoking librarians, country folk, femme fatales and more. He’s Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe and Anna Karina—but none of his heroines have names, their only unifying factor being their rebellious refusal to follow convention.
In his Rear Screen Projections series from 1980, he mimics a technique used by filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock (he watched Rear Window 10 times in one week as a child) — he films himself and his background separately and pastes the two images together.
“I was more influenced by movies than visual art,” Sherman recalls of her early practice. “I was thinking, ‘Why would she be in that situation? Doesn’t she know it’s dangerous?’ It was also a way of moving to New York as a vulnerable young woman, feeling the strangeness and terror of a big city. It was a way of acting with confidence.”
Sherman grew up on Long Island. Her father was an engineer for the Grumman aircraft company, and her mother was a teacher. She studied art at Buffalo State University, where she struggled with her shyness. She would go out in character and stand quietly in the corner of parties, wearing thrift store clothes and makeup. Her unique artistic voice began to emerge after her then-boyfriend suggested she document her transformations. She discovered that photography was “much faster” and conceptual than painting.
So she moved to New York at 23, and over the next decades, she continued to use style, prosthetics, and technology to question female identities and female roles in society. She played so many characters that the real Cindy Sherman became something of an eccentric enigma. When MoMA held a retrospective of her work in 2012, several attendees thought they saw her there in disguise—one said she was wearing wire-rimmed glasses, another believed she had arrived in a fat suit.
“It wasn’t true at all, but it was fascinating to me,” he says, smiling.
I ask where the desire to dress up came from. “It really has to do with being the youngest of five children,” she says with the easy self-awareness of someone who has been to therapy. “There were nine years between me and the next child and 19 years between me and my oldest. I realized my family had a whole different life ahead of me. It was like a myth to me.
“So I thought maybe they didn’t want me the way I was, so I should try to be a different person. A lot of little girls back then played dress-up. But instead of trying to be a princess or a fairy, something cute and feminine, I was always trying to be a monster, a witch or an old lady.”
The exhibition comes at a time when Greece is experiencing a rise in violence against women. In response, the museum, which also houses the famous marble statuettes from the 3rd millennium BC — interpreted by scholars as depictions of a female deity associated with fertility and rebirth — wanted to showcase Sherman’s critique of society’s depiction and treatment of women.
Whether it’s her Color Studies series, which shows women in intimate moments, or her Centerfolds, which reference erotic images from men’s magazines, her photographs center on the female body. This has sometimes been divisive. Because the women in Centerfolds appear melancholic, vulnerable, or frightened, New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz called them “the least sexy pictures ever,” while some feminists have condemned them as provocative.
“I see my work as feminist, but I don’t see it as hammering a message into someone’s head,” Sherman says. “It’s subtle, because I’m a subtle person. I don’t think I would be a good advocate for arguing with anyone. I’m terrible at quoting things or conveying anyone’s opinion. That’s why I left the paintings untitled. I think everyone will interpret things differently, and I can’t control how someone’s art history background will affect how they see my work.”
Nevertheless, the controversy surrounding Sherman’s work made him a sensation. In 2011, his Untitled #96 from Centrefolds sold at auction for $3.89 million—the most expensive photograph ever made—and he has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”
Does she think media representations of women have improved? “I think women are more aware of their place in society, their rights, and their power—or lack thereof,” she says. “They’re also a little more aware of how our appearance is controlled; how we try to conform to what society expects of us. But it’s hard to know. The whole selfie culture—and selfie tools that automatically correct your skin tone or remove blemishes—can be damaging to young minds trying to understand their place in society.”
But Sherman enjoys playing with some of these tools himself. In recent years, he’s been posting Instagram portraits, using apps and artificial intelligence to distort his features. He looks pretty weird in all of them, a fitting commentary on the divisive nature of social media. “I actually find it really fun. But now I get a little frustrated because when I try to make a new image for Instagram, I feel like it’s not new enough.”
I tell him that he once had to go through a whole process to shape himself, and now he can just press a button, which I find both amusing and frightening. Is he worried about the threat posed by AI?
“I definitely see how that could be a big threat, especially with these deepfakes. But whenever I type something like ‘Middle-aged woman alone in the woods, Cindy Sherman style,’ it’s not so threatening to me that I just laugh. It’s a really bad version of my job. But some of the faces I’ve created from AI are great. It helps me think differently about what’s possible.”
Sherman is currently trying to figure out his “next steps.” “I don’t feel like I’m going to retire, but getting older changes things,” he says. “When I was younger, I could play both young and old characters, but now my range is limited.”
She has gone through many changes, not only professionally but also personally. Before dating filmmaker Paul HO and musician David Byrne, she was married to video artist Michel Auder for 17 years (during which time Auder struggled with heroin addiction). Today, she enjoys the sights of Athens with her new partner.
Which reminds me, has he ever heard Cindy of a Thousand Lives, the song Billy Bragg sang about her? “Yeah, I was very flattered, especially because we’d never met. But I guess we’re all made up of slightly different lives.”
And then we all take a selfie together and say goodbye.