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Artist or Maker: Cindy Sherman (b. 1954)

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Provenance: Metro Pictures, New York
Max Protech Gallery, New York
Anon. sale; Sotheby's, New York, 12 May 2004, lot 38
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

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Exhibited: Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, Cindy Sherman , February-March 1980 (another example exhibited).
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Eight Artists: The Anxious Edge , April-June 1982 (another example exhibited).
Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Lichtbildnisse: The Portrait in Photography , 1982 (another example exhibited).
Milwaukee Art Museum, New Figuration in America , December 1982-January 1983 (another example exhibited).
London, Institute of Contemporary Art; and Liverpool, Bluecoat Gallery, Urban Kisses/Slum Kisses , 1982-1983 (another example exhibited).
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Ghent, Gewad; Bristol, Watershed Gallery; Southampton, Jack Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton; Erlangen, Palais Stutterheim; West Berlin, Haus Am Waldsee; Geneva, Centre d'Art Contemporain; Copenhagen, Sonja Henie and Niels Onstadt Foundation; and Humlebaek, Louisana Museum, Cindy Sherman , December 1982-April 1984, no. 30 (illustrated; another example exhibited).
Stony Brook, Fine Art Center Gallery, State University of New York, Cindy Sherman , October-November 1983 (another example exhibited).
Akron Art Museum; Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art; Des Moines Art Center; Baltimore Museum of Art; and Tokyo, Laforet Museum, Cindy Sherman , April 1984-Fall 1986, p. 20 (example exhibited).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Self-Portrait , November 1985-January 1986 (another example exhibited).
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Cindy Sherman , January-March 1986 (another example exhibited).
London, National Portrait Gallery; Plymouth Arts Center; Southampton, John Hansard Gallery; and Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, Staging the Self: Self-Portrait Photography 1840s-1980s , November 1986-January 1987 (another example exhibited).
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art; and Dallas Museum of Art, Cindy Sherman , July-October 1987, pl. 30 (illustrated; another example exhibited).
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation , May-August 1989.
Milan, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Cindy Sherman , October-November 1990, p. 28 (another example exhibited).
Basel, Kunsthalle; Munich, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst; and London, Whitechapel Gallery, Cindy Sherman , March-September 1991, p. 24 (another example exhibited).
London, Saatchi Collection, Cindy Sherman, Richard Artschwager, Richard Wilson , January-July 1991, pl. 78 (another example exhibited).
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Exploring the Unknown Self: Self Portrait of Contemporary Women , June-August 1991, pl. 1 (another example exhibited)
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Recent Acquisitions: Photography , February-April 1993.
Washington, D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Directions: Cindy Sherman - Film Stills , March-June 1995, pl. 48 (illustrated; and illustrated on exhibition brochure; another example exhibited)
Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Mdlmo, Kunsthall; and Luzern, Kunstmuseum, Cindy Sherman: Photoarbeiten 1975-1995 , May 1995-February 1996, pl. 33 (illustrated; another example exhibited).
Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Bilboa, Sala de Exposiciones REKALDE; and Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Cindy Sherman , March 1996-March 1997, p. 56, no. 23 (illustrated; another example exhibited).
Shiga, Museum of Modern Art; Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art; and Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cindy Sherman , July 1996-December 1996, p. 79, pl. 29 (illustrated; another example exhibited).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman: The Complete Film Stills , June-September 1997.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Open Ends , September 2000-March 2001.

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Notes: On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.
Much like the lone traveler in Untitled Film Still No. 48 , Cindy Sherman's photograph pulls the viewer into an ambiguous journey, where one perpetually finds oneself at some single point along the continuum of a narrative that never has a clear beginning or end. With her ground-breaking series of ntitled Film Stills from the late 1970s, which are frequently acclaimed as her most prescient and influential body of work, Sherman opened up new vistas in the field of photography. Dressing up as female protagonists who are both cannily familiar from the world of film yet impossible to pin down, she made herself the subject of a camera that seemed to be in persistent voyeuristic pursuit of her. In this wide shot of a dramatic western landscape where Sherman masquerades as a lone fair-haired woman who faces tentatively into the distance, waiting to hitch a ride to some unknown fate, Untitled Film Still No. 48 is arguably the most epic image in the series.

Sherman had a passion ("instinctive," as she characterized it) for playing dress-up ever since she was a young girl. Instead of outgrowing that passion she transformed it into a potent creative force. In the Untitled Film Stills we see her acting out myriad roles with the aid of costumes, make-up and settings that coalesce into intriguing scenarios. Her choice of costumes, poses and backgrounds knowingly point to a gamut of filmic influences, from the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism and Hitchcock, to classic Hollywood and B-films from the 1940s to the 1960s. Fascinated by those decades that were just out of reach, she enjoyed trolling thrift shops for costumes while at the same time studying film and art while in college in Buffalo, New York.

Sherman had been drawn to film since childhood, explaining that, "I was always glued to the television when I was a kid, and I loved movies." Less interested in the dominant medium of painting, she found herself getting into "Conceptual, Minimal, Performance, body art, film-- alternatives," all of which she would weave together into her own unique body of work. Sherman can in fact be credited in large part for instigating a seismic paradigm shift in the art world, where over just the last few decades photographic methods have taken center stage in the art world and command a respect that only painting and sculpture had previously been given. Her interest in performance art brought a new dimension to her predilection for playing dress-up. In the late seventies, she explored creating various characters with her thrift store finds and make up. Sometimes she would go out into public as these characters, whether to art openings or to work at Artists Space in New York (where she on occasion arrived in the guise of a retro secretary). None of her creations were intended to be expressive of her inner self, however. What made them so rich is that through them she inhabits and plays with a whole range of vivid stereotypes of female characters that had been established through the last few decades in popular culture.

Sherman's breakthrough came when she decided to take these characters as subjects of photographs that would resemble film stills from movies that did not exist, but were eerily familiar from the characters and mises-en-sc/genes she created. She used the framework of the film still, a type of photography that normally stages a scene from a film for use in advertisements to spur potential audience to see the film, a photographic come-on that attempts to capture in a frozen moment the narrative dynamic of a movie. Drawing from a mental image bank that she had developed from watching movies and television, and reading books on film, she constantly metamorphosed into characters that seemed caught up in cinematic plots from which they could not escape. "The shots I would choose were always the ones in-between the action," she has noted, which only served to multiply the possible directions of narrative labyrinths in which these heroines were mired, and spurred the viewer into a more active role of ceaseless speculation.

Each film still captures Sherman alone in the frame, sometimes seeming to peer at a character that stands just beyond our view-- although often the camera is placed at a vantage point that suggests that we, the viewer, are positioned as a voyeur in the shadows. While Sherman's work has stimulated lively debate about the presence of the "male gaze," and many post modern critiques about how certain modes of looking can be used to regulate and oppress individuals within a culture, the artist herself has admitted that such a notion was not consciously present in the way she conceived the series. Yet repeatedly, the characters she embodied were women who seem to be meandering on a path that might lead to somewhere outside the borders of which society had proscribed them, which lends a resistant voice to her work. As she put it, "I'm not sure if I was yet aware of the fact that in most early films, women who don't follow the accepted order of marriage and family, who are strong, rebellious characters, are either killed off in the script or see the light and become tamed, joining a nunnery or something. Usually they die. I think I must have been unconsciously drawn to those types of characters."

The lighting, settings and camera angles with which she frames her characters are always rigorously constructed, even if they are calculated to look off-hand. She enjoyed being able to work on her film stills in isolation with complete control over how she staged each scene, rather than on an actual film set hat would have required extensive collaboration. In some cases though she would set up a scene so that someone else would have to release the camera's shutter. For many of the interior shots of the series, she used her own living and working space in downtown Manhattan around Fulton Street, while the exterior scenes were chosen from notes she took as she walked around New York or while traveling. Envisioning each individual film still as an inseparable part of the series, each of the 69 shots was left untitled with an arbitrary number, emphasizing the conceptual nature of the project. Sherman wanted the series to encompass both a wide range of scenarios and styles, choosing to add more long shots to her repertoire if she had enough close-ups. She decided to end the series when she felt that the scenarios would start repeating themselves.

The present photograph, which Sherman refers to as "the hitchhiker," was taken while traveling through Arizona with her parents in 1979. She decided to utilize the landscape as an essential part of the composition, and recalled that "Out there I wanted to be further away from the camera, I didn't want to compete with the landscape." Dressed in the guise of a seemingly innocent young girl, standing haltingly by the side of the empty highway with a small suitcase, the image's drama is heightened by the way she is dwarfed amongst the grand landscape in the light of either dusk or dawn. Sherman used a flash for fill-in (having her father handle the camera and flash to her specifications), so that the lonely figure appears almost as a cut-out against the background, heightening the sense of her estrangement. Whether this character is escaping from an unknown drama or simply yearning to leave a life too mundane for her ambitions remains characteristically unclear. The image bears a resemblance to a scene in Antonioni's L'Avventura, where Monica Vitti turns her back toward the viewer to face a hilly landscape and still sea, into which another female character has mysteriously disappeared. The sense of place in Sherman's photograph is unmistakably of the American West, but she did admit to being extremely influenced by the visual character of European film stills, as she found that "the original films were harder to figure out [and] I found that more mysterious" (8). Untitled Film Still No. 48 both exemplifies the nuanced orchestration of character, setting and composition that Sherman created in her influential series of untitled film stills, though it also stands on its own as a powerful photograph.

25249095: Edit proofs for Untitled Film Still No. 48.

24650045: Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura , 1960. c Janus Films Photofest.