Untitled Film Still #53 (Blonde: Close-Up with Lamp)

Cindy Sherman has said that she was influenced by New York Conceptual artist Eleanor Antin's self-reconstructing performances that address feminine stereotypes, gender boundaries, and racial definitions. Antin, however, is not a photographer, but a producer of ideas. Sherman takes her own photographs and has refashioned conceptual undercurrents of performance and body art into increasingly powerful visual critiques. Raised in northern New Jersey, Sherman spent much of her early years watching television, drawing, and dressing up. She took up photography in 1975 as a student at SUNY-Buffalo and documented herself in different guises for a class assignment.

From her early work as an undergraduate and after her move to New York City in 1977, Sherman continued to assume various roles as inventor, actress, director, costumer, and producer of scenarios that she photographed. Her "film stills" comment on a range of gender issues and were inspired by the small black-and-white glossies of actors that used to hang in movie theater lobbies. The AMAM's photograph belongs to a series of sixty-five grainy, black-and-white images that have the look and feel of the 1950s, presenting women as victims or predators- stereotypes reinforced by society and the movies. Dressed in a jewel-neck white blouse, carefully made up and coiffed, and posed next to a lamp, Sherman faces the viewer but averts her eyes, all within a tightly constrained space. "When I'm really working there is this curiosity to see myself," Sherman says. "It's one of the most pleasurable parts, to look in the mirror and sort of not recognize myself. It gets even better after you develop the film. In the photograph you see things you didn't even know you were doing."

Untitled Film Still #53 is one of an edition of three approximately 30-by-40-inch prints that were produced for each film still. This work joins three other Sherman photographs in the AMAM's collection: two black-and-white photographs, Untitled Film Still #20 (Lincoln Tower Girl-Streetwalker, 1978) and Untitled Film Still #55 (Blonde in Alley, 1980), and a large type "C" color photograph, Untitled #87 (Blue Shirt/Red Blanket, 1981).