Product Description

It was in the mid-70s that Cindy Sherman began making her earliest works, in which she explored various manipulations of her own persona. She began by experimenting with makeup and costumes, getting dressed up for parties and surprising her friends. She then moved on to photograph herself in the various personas she had created, producing highly inventive but somewhat more primitive versions of the seminal work for which she would later become known, the Untitled Film Stills series. It was during this early period that Sherman created A Play of Selves--a visual tale of a young woman overwhelmed by various alter-egos that compete inside of her, and her final conquering of self-doubt. Acted out with 16 separate characters, these 72 photographic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of herself-as-subject in a series of staged photographs. Published here for the first time, these photographs include hundreds of shots of the artist costumed as various characters in dozens of poses. Organized in a four-act "play" with an elaborate, handwritten script, the individual images were cut by the artist from original black-and-white prints. Preface by Cindy Sherman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470487 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Released on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English, German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, German

About the Author
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954. She began her Film Stills series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980--key early shows included a first survey at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1982 and a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1987. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts.