Cindy Sherman and the Performance of Self in the 1980s

The performative photography of Cindy Sherman in the 1980s turns likeness into a rehearsal. Sherman appears before the lens as writers, aristocrats, ageing performers, monsters and children, constructing each character through costume, gesture, makeup and posture. The body becomes a stage on which the unstable relationship between identity and appearance can be examined.

Her images can feel startlingly current in a Melbourne café or on a Sydney train, where commuters scroll through filtered feeds and polished images often precede the people behind them. Sherman’s achievement was to make that process visible through a medium that claims to preserve truth. From her early “Untitled Film Series” to the elaborate fairy-tale portraits of the mid-1980s, she used the camera to expose identity as an artifice with social weight.

The body becomes a stage

After studying at SUNY Purchase, Sherman became immersed in New York’s downtown art world, where the gallery system, underground performance and film culture overlapped. Her late-1970s black-and-white self-portraits test the camera’s claim to reveal an inner truth. The work remains deliberately unstable: a face may confront us while also performing a character assembled from images already circulating through the culture.

The “Untitled Film Series,” begun in 1977, made that tension explicit. Its title evokes cinema, yet each frame contains no narrative; costume, body and setting propose a film that remains unwritten. By photographing herself as an elderly woman, a man and a range of social types, Sherman took authorship away from the supposedly fixed sitter and made the studio a laboratory.

Her work was read readily through feminist theory, including Rosalind Krauss and Meyer Schapiro’s 1982 essay “The Subject of Feminism.” The Woman Gallery’s examination of Leonora Carrington’s surreal legacy provides a revealing parallel: both artists treat the female body as a site of cultural myth rather than a stable object. Sherman’s pictures ask viewers to notice the stories attached to a body before deciding what that body supposedly means.

Costume turns gender into theatre

The “Fashion” series of 1980–81 is built around garments borrowed from friends and family: old-fashioned dresses, lace, gloves, hats and the stiff accessories of an invented past. These clothes do more than provide character. They determine how a body stands, moves and is viewed, making costume a form of social dialogue. Sherman turns fashion into a system that conceals one identity while announcing another.

Across “Fashion,” “Myths” and the related black-and-white portraits, Sherman draws upon the visual codes of art history, cinema and advertising. Her “Myths” series presents figures resembling noblewomen, deities, film-novel personalities and creatures from painted tableaux. Gender appears as a performance shaped by familiar stereotypes, yet the images remain ambivalent. Sherman can expose the femme fatale or the theatrical hostess as a repeated image while also demonstrating the pleasure and power contained in such constructions.

For Australian viewers, the material culture behind these pictures has familiar echoes. Saturday searches through Sydney’s charity shops or Melbourne’s vintage rooms can uncover the lace, suitcases, gloves and theatrical dresses that Sherman borrowed. Wearing an op-shop find for a portrait changes its meaning: inexpensive clothing carries histories of class, labour and colonial trade, while fashion advertising sells fantasy as though it were identity.

Horror, ageing and the unstable portrait

In the “Disasters” series, produced between 1982 and 1984, Sherman applies prosthetic makeup, wigs and painted wounds to create bodies affected by burns, cuts, bruises and unnatural swelling. The images borrow from horror films and slapstick, placing the viewer close to revulsion and laughter at once. Ageing becomes especially disruptive because it refuses the youthful assumptions often used to organise commercial photography and respectable self-presentation.

The “Fairy Tales” series draws on European stories rather than the sanitised versions associated with contemporary children’s entertainment. Sherman’s princesses, witches, children and dwarves carry the ambiguity of old folklore: beauty can appear inert or threatening, while innocence can conceal cruelty. In the 1984 “Roxy” photographs, she again paints herself, this time as a sharply styled figure associated with bars, cigarettes and rock culture. Each series changes the genre governing the body while retaining the camera’s intimate proximity.

Australian law adds practical weight to questions about representation. Under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), photographers generally own copyright in their images, while moral rights protect attribution and integrity; commercial reuse therefore depends on permission or an applicable licence. State privacy and image-of-privacy laws may also become relevant when private spaces or vulnerable people are depicted. The federal Privacy Act 1988 primarily regulates organisations it covers, so taking or publishing a photograph does not remove every ethical or legal responsibility. Sherman’s collapse of photographer and sitter complicates these debates by making authorship and exposure part of the same creative act.

Images for a media-saturated decade

By the 1980s, fashion magazines, television advertising, music television and film supplied an endless parade of prescribed identities. Sherman entered this visual environment while challenging its demand for consistency. Her studio lighting and formal compositions resemble publicity portraits and fashion spreads, but the unstable bodies within them puncture those familiar promises. Even when an image appears polished, it exposes the labour required to manufacture a marketable self.

These questions travel well to Australian gallery spaces. The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne offer settings where portraiture can be considered as performance rather than straightforward likeness. At commercial stands at Sydney and Melbourne art fairs, limited-edition photographic prints also place Sherman within a broader art market. Framing, edition numbers, provenance and certificates then become part of the work’s circulation, connecting its critical challenge to the conditions under which it is collected.

Broader conversations about photography and culture in experimental art journalism can help place her work between institutional display and popular reproduction. That position matters. Sherman’s photographs were reproduced in books, magazines and exhibitions, yet their scale and serial form resist the idea of an image designed for instant consumption. They ask for sustained looking, and their apparent familiarity keeps generating new visual details.

Take the work into the gallery

Seen beside the branded selfies, filters and professional profiles that structure daily life, Sherman’s work feels simultaneously distant and immediate. Her characters resemble the people we become for a job, a family gathering or an online audience, but their construction remains visible. That visibility is the point: each portrait allows the viewer to see identity as a collaboration between private sensation and public language.