Untitled #201 from 1989 is a superb example of Sherman’s series History Portraits (1988-90), in which she re-imagines the genre of Old Master portraiture within her contemporary, photographic context. Questioning the authenticity of the past as it shifts with time, Untitled #201 offers a persuasive and provocative exploration into the construction of identity, representation and the self. By dressing up as figures from history and staging a portrait, the artist seamlessly fuses replication and originality, while questioning the security of identity. Untitled #201 subsumes the viewer in a complex and contradictory web of fantasy and reality. Here the disguise allows the photograph to feel simultaneously contemporary and traditional as Sherman assumes the role of both model and artist. By becoming both, Sherman brings a performative element to her photographs. The theatrical overtones of the composition mingle with Sherman’s ability to tell an engaging and humorous story while never fully revealing who she is meant to be impersonating.

Included in the initial exhibition of her History Portraits at Metro Pictures in New York City in 1990, Untitled #201, is a seminal example of the series. Sherman does not recreate history with these works per se, but rather represents, through her own inclusion, and the juxtaposition of the contemporary and the historical, the fading memory that is the past. Sherman diminishes the traditional linearity and “factuality” of the photographic medium. Performative and static; historical and contemporary; masculine and feminine; satirical and sincere – Sherman layers dichotomies one upon each other in such as a way as to create a new reality, one squarely contained within the bounds of works such as Untitled #201