Cindy Sherman started her classic Untitled Film Stills series in 1977: she dressed herself in other people’s lives and clothes, and documented the result. They seemed to make every woman the typecast star of her own film. Since then, she has photographed herself in female roles from a rotting corpse to a Renaissance queen. Though the shots are always of Sherman, she doesn’t mean them as self-portraits. They are more like novels written in the first person, where the narrator is just another character. A new retrospective of the film stills through Sherman’s most recent work celebrates the full scope of her achievement.
