Untitled, from the portfolio The Indomitable Spirit

Cindy Sherman began using herself as the subject of her art while still a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She started as a painter, but she abandoned the medium for the freedom she associated with photography. “[T]here was nothing more to say [through painting],” she has said. “I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.” In 1977, Sherman embarked on her most well-known project, a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs called “Untitled Film Stills,” in which she poses as a variety of archetypal female characters from American cinema. Sherman rejects the idea of self-portraiture, and instead describes her body as chameleon that facilitates these depersonalized portrayals of fictional types. During the late 1970s, color was just starting to be recognized by the American photographic establishment—represented most importantly at the time by the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art—as a legitimate form for art photography. This work is an early example from Sherman’s transition from black-and-white to color, which she later used in explorations of a darker and more grotesque vision of femininity. “The Indomitable Spirit” multiartist portfolio, from which this print derives, was created to accompany a 1990 exhibition of the same name and sold to benefit the American Foundation for AIDS Research. —Isabelle McDonald ’23