About the Work
For the diptych Untitled (Doctor and Nurse), Sherman cheekily poses as both the male and the female in a homespun healthcare team; the male doctor is appropriately masculine, with a stern and serious face, while the nurse is portrayed as a friendlier figure, her mouth forming a half-smile. Photographed in black and white, and oval-shaped like an “old-time” photo album, the image looks as though it could be styled from an early postwar TV sitcom. It humorously emphasizes how strictly gender roles still adhere to antiquated notions of masculine dominance and feminine passivity.
About the Artist
Known for posed photographs that explore and question representations of women from Renaissance portraiture to contemporary mass media, Cindy Sherman is one of the most important artists working today. Serving as her own model in the majority of her work, Sherman’s self-portraits came to prominence in the late 1970s through a series of black-and-white photographs called Untitled Film Stills. In these works, produced between 1977 and 1980 and evocative of glossy 8x10-inch publicity shots, Sherman used different costumes, backdrops, wigs, facial expressions, make-up, and poses to transform herself into a range of female archetypes from debutante to starlet, from housewife to lush.
A remarkable performer, Sherman reconfigures her face and body for the camera — either through subtle distortions or grotesque prosthetics — to render herself all but unrecognizable to the audience. Each image is overloaded with detail, every nuance caught by the artist's eye. While Sherman is usually disguised in her pictures, she leaves details slightly askew so that the constructed scene, and its related artifice, is revealed.
Since the early 1980s, most of Sherman’s work has been of larger scale and in color, but her principal concern—to confront how media influences our perception of identity— has remained constant. All of the photographs are untitled and Sherman’s characters (with the exception of several sequential shots in the Untitled Film Still series) have never appeared twice, leaving the viewer to consider the works without any narrative help from the artist.
