Sherman as Cahun (1975)

Cindy Sherman :: Untitled, 1975. Chromogenic photograph. © Cindy Sherman | src Brooklyn Museum
Cindy Sherman :: Untitled, 1975. Chromogenic photograph. © Cindy Sherman | src Brooklyn Museum
Cindy Sherman :: Untitled, 1975. Chromogenic photograph. © Cindy Sherman | src Brooklyn Museum
Cindy Sherman :: Untitled, 1975. Chromogenic photograph. © Cindy Sherman | src Brooklyn Museum

This photograph from early in Cindy Sherman’s artistic career indicates a burgeoning interest in what has become a lifelong investigation into using herself as subject. Produced in 1975, during her time as an art student at the State University of New York, Buffalo, the work prefigures her famous Untitled Film Stills series by two years. In it, the artist references Claude Cahun, an early Surrealist photographer whose androgynous self-portraits inspired a later generation of feminist theorists to think about gender as a social role that is performed rather than innate—ideas that would become central to Sherman’s oeuvre from the mid-1970s onward.” (quoted from source)

Cindy Sherman :: Untitled, 1975. Silver print with Sherman's signature, dates, and edition notation in ink, on verso. Printed 2004. | src Classic & Contemporary Photographs · Swann Galleries
Cindy Sherman :: Untitled, 1975. Silver print with Sherman’s signature, dates, and edition notation in ink, on verso. Printed 2004. | src Classic & Contemporary Photographs · Swann Galleries

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