Untitled

1985

Cindy Sherman’s reputation was built on the success of her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black-and-white photographs from the late 1970s in which the artist depicted herself in various typecast roles of the Hollywood heroine. In that series, she described how the male gaze reduces the female subject to stereotype.

The series Fairy Tales and Disasters of the mid- to late 1980s marked a major shift in Sherman’s self-representation. External appearance became the means by which to explore the contents of an internal world, one influenced by fairytales, myths, and fantasy. If the Untitled Film Stills expressed a sense of anxiety about the lurking male gaze, then the Fairy Tales, such as this one, reveal a monstrous “other” we all carry inside. The harsh, sickly greenish-yellow lighting emphasizes the slobbering lips, decaying teeth, and tense fists of this character. The vulnerable girls and alluring temptresses of the Film Stills are replaced by grotesque figures emerging from some netherworld.