Cindy Sherman

Aging Women

Untitled #466
Chromogenic color print, 2.46 x 1.62 m. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Untitled #470
Chromogenic color print, 2.16x1.47m. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Untitled #474
Chromogenic color print, 2.31 x 1.53m. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Aging Women
American photographer Cindy Sherman has become famous for using herself through an acuteinvocation of iconic mannerisms from cinematic skills, fashion photography, pornography and painting, becoming the prime exemplar of postmodern art photography1. Of all the self-portraits, performance and staged photography that have been created and have received critical attention since the 70s for their visual generic content, it is probably Sherman’s that have caused the most controversy andhave changed photography. Cindy Sherman emerged in the late seventies with her series of black and white Untitled Film Stills, where she represented herself with different female roles that had appear in films and TV shows of the previous decades. They consist of librarians, hillbillies, seductress, waifs and urban sophisticates captured amid equally typecast settings, common prototypes of mediaclichés constructed out of male fantasies2 and question society’s feminine perception and expectations. Sherman’s second best known oeuvre is her History Portraits, a commissioned series of thirty-five photographs that blend Post-Modern consciousness with timeless masterpieces of European masters3 such as Raphael, Fouquet and Caravaggio.
More recently, in 2008, Sherman created the SocietyPortraits, a series of self directed color chromogenic prints portraits in which Cindy transformed herself into stereotypical high society female characters, portraying the sad and constant growing anxiety among women of keeping their youth and status. In this essay I will discuss the way Untitled #466, Untitled #470, Untitled #474 depict the media’s pressure on female middle aged adults to maintain ajuvenile appearance through cosmetic interventions, heavy make-up and custom clothes, and how this plays an important role in the way society perceives these characters.
Untitled #466
This print of 2008 of 147.3x163.8 cm stands as the first photograph of the exhibition. Sherman depicts herself as a socialite around fifty years old who wears an elegant turquoise tunic with floral silver patterns,which could be an Indian textile, covering her entire body except her hands, feet, neck and face. On both of her hands Sherman wears stylish jewelry; on her right hand she has a silver ring with a red stone and another with a turquoise gem, on the left hand she wears a golden ring with a gray stone. The subject also wears a particular style of long golden earrings, which, together with her trendygarment, could be seen as jewelry worthy of a goddess or an empress. Her bleached blonde hair is combed with a center part with a lower bun held by a brown hairclip that blends with the background. Sherman puts thick make-up on her apparently cosmetically altered face; she overuses concealer on her eye bags creating a difference of tones between the eye area and the rest of the face. Her eyes aredelineated with a maroon tone and her eye shadows are smoky black and brown. The eyebrows present clear evidence of make-up; her left eyebrow fades at the end, and looked at closely the real and almost invisible pattern of her blonde brows shows right underneath it. The subject’s plump Botox lips have dark pink lipstick and maroon lip liner outside her real Vermilion border, giving them a fleshylook. Sherman has a French manicure that looked at closely reveals fake nails glued over her real ones. This “classy” perfection unravels when we see Sherman wearing a pink spangle sandal, like the ones you find at the dollar store5, and her thick compression stockings, the type older people use for varicose veins6. In this piece Sherman not only portrays an aging socialite, but a figure with a...