Eng Yommanak
Week 4 Cindy Sherman
Cynthia Morris "Cindy" Sherman is an American photographer and film director her images are the centre of an inspiring array of character studies created over decades. Sherman expands on contemporary society's fascination with aspiration, narcissism and the cult of celebrity, and explores the resulting emotional fragility. In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking “Untitled Film Stills.” Over three years, the series grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the “Untitled Film Stills” resembles publicity pictures made on movie sets which are stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s “Stills” are entirely ficitionasl they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a worldful with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.
An example of her "Untitled Film Stills" in this page we see a woman, Cindy Sherman posed and dressed in a steroeytpical woman. One of the photographs we see her cleaning and sorting out books in her maid looking uniform which is a depiction of the gender stereotypes that woman do the cleaning. Another photograph with her washing the dishes is common representation of how soceity looks towards the roles of woman. The detergent and how everything is set in the kitchen is symbolically repsenting the common phrase "Woman do the cooking and cleaning". Cindy Sherman challanges these ideas and gender types in soceity through her photographs.
My Cindy Sherman Photograph
This is my Cindy Sherman Photograph I have placed various objects in the scene to create a homey feel within the photograph. I have my model wearing maid looking clothing which symbolises the gender stereotypes that woman do the cleaning. The vacuum futher empahises the phrase that woman do cleaning. When we think of a woman cleaning and doing chores we usually see them washing dishes, doing the laundry, dusting the house and vacuuming.