Cindy Sherman's Analysis

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Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) is arguably one of the most well-known and influential photographers in contemporary art. Exhibited worldwide in a variety of venues, particularly in major cities throughout the United States and Europe, her pieces inspire a great deal of feminist and postmodernist debate and discussion because they embody ideas related to “studies of the decentered self, the mass media's reconstruction of reality, the inescapability of the male gaze, the seductions of abjection, and any number of related philosophical issues”1. In “Automatism and Agency Intertwined: A Spectrum of Photographic Intentionality” (2012), Carol Armstrong analyzes the tensions between automatism and agency inherent to photography as a medium and argues that …show more content…

Her work uses the visual language of genres familiar to anyone versed in popular culture”38 As in Untitled Film Still #33, anyone with any remote knowledge of vintage films can understand the connection to the cinematic tropes that Sherman references. Because Sherman explicitly vocalizes her desire to avoid associations with “high art” and successfully creates work accessible by anyone familiar with Western – specifically American – culture, her work not only challenges social hierarchies that restrict access to artists and viewers with marginalized identities within the museum space; it also confronts power structures that discourage and restrict non-white, non-able-bodied, non-heterosexual, non-class-privileged, and, more generally, anyone without (easy) access a theory-heavy arts education from entering the museum/gallery space and engaging with the work in a meaningful way. Because Sherman is a white, formally-educated, class-privileged

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