Research Paper On Cindy Sherman

I have chosen Sally Mann as my artist as she is an extraordinary photographer that went against the grain to create something completely different. She has a strange way of making outstanding, personal imagery. She inspires my own work because of her ability to see things others would not.

Cindy Sherman, well known for her photography of her representing issues that commonly represent both the roles of being an artist, being a woman and the two combined. Sherman grew up in a large family that did not have any interest in art. Her knowledge of art growing up was very minimal until she went to college. She, then, started to paint. She quickly realized she did not like painting because of the lack of intimacy or recreation of a particular setting. She did, however love photography and started pursued an interest in that.

Lucille Ball was a beloved comedian/actress who opened and expanded opportunities for the profession of female comedians. Throughout Ball’s career, she was able to shape an industry allowing females to participate in a career of comedy that mostly males dominated. Lucille Ball is known as the First Lady of comedy. An influential person who has either a positive or negative effect on people is someone who grabs attention and who impacts people. Lucille Ball was certainly a positive influential person.

Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).

Josephine Baker is a well know African American because of her being an french resident agent. She also was entertainer and activist.

American Civil Rights Activist Amelia Platts was born on August 18th, 1911 in Savannah, Georgia. She had nine siblings, of her parents George and Anna Platts. She had Cherokee and German ancestry. As a young girl her and her family attended church and she later became interested in Women’s Suffrage and started campaigning. Amelia had 4 children of her own.

“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.” Shannon L. Alder. Patty Hearst was a 19 year old college student who was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley. Her kidnappers were members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was heavily beaten and passed out during her abduction. Gun shots from a machine gun were also fired.

Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.

Mary Cassatt is known world-wide for her impressing art in which she focuses mainly in the everyday life of women and children. She is an American artist born in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844, but later relocates to Europe in 1866 to pursue to work in art. This was mainly due to her family’s and society’s objections to women in the field of art. There she met and befriended famous Impressionist Edgar Degas. Because of her close friendship with Degas, she grew courage to continue to do art in her own way. She continued to paint until she slowly began to lose her eyesight and later died in 1926. Cassatt was part of the Impressionist style movement, in which she painted portraits unlike many others who painted landscapes (biography.com). Her artwork

Cindy Sherman the American photographer is known as the queen of the self because of her self-portraits and her extravagant dresses.

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Sherman’s work talks about her own belief that representations itself is pre-coded, and in this case by cinema. In one of the stills in particular, Still Number 6, Sherman poses as a woman who looks as though she is daydreaming. In this photograph she is holding a mirror in one hand, and has a chilling blank stare on her face. The photograph has a disturbing undertone to it, which gives the feeling that she could also

thoughts. Over the years of history, artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and many

I choose Cindy Sherman, when searching for a photographer that I wanted to research. What caught my eye was the amazing variety of tools that were presented in the photograph.

Perception of the Female in the Modern Era: Gender Identity and the Act of "Becoming" in Cindy Sherman's History Portraits