Cindy Sherman- Nobody's Here But Me (1994)

“Through a photograph, you can make people believe anything”

I feel even more responsive to her earlier work, now that I understand where she was coming from.  In a much similar sense, I myself have felt alone and isolated in the new town I find myself in for school. It is intriguing how she took that depressed feeling of solidarity and paired it with her fear of New York City, and created these different views of herself, to help cope and escape from it all. I have always assumed she was just a fan of movie stills.

I like how she references the first time she thinks about the “male gaze,” and deliberately flips it around to show the males that are gazing that it is perverse and perverted.  She draws inspiration from the media surrounding her, and as she put it, it was probably because she was part of the first generation to have a television to view all the time. 

I am not particularly a fan of the work after Robert Lango is interviewed and speaks of the “paining” period in the 80s, where men’s artworks were being bought up and primarily paintings. So she started creating work that was “un-buyable.”  I would have to agree with that statement.  The images in her previous work, with herself as the main model, did exactly what she anticipated in my opinion; it made you create your own story line of the individual.  When she starts desensitizing her work with plastic models, in my opinion it loses all semblance of having a real purpose. I think it is primarily created to shock and awe. Especially when “plastic pornography” is the subject that turns erotic and is directed at the NEA’s censorship on artists.  It does just that; I am just not sure if I am a fan.

Jamie Lee Curtis is quoted saying that Cindy Sherman’s work is “Haunting, Scary, Perfect, she created a whole story with one film still.”