"I'm good at using my face as a canvas... I'll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face."Cindy Sherman, 2011

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1977-1980 stand at the intersection of Pop Culture and Feminism: presenting a series of images that are not to be interpreted as actual women but as mass-marketed stereotypes of women, all of whom are impersonated by Sherman herself. Indeed, the sole subject of her photographs is she herself, yet they are not self-portraits. Through variations in costume, makeup, setting, facial expression, and pose Sherman invents a different character for every image. Each woman has a different appearance and personality. Effectually, Sherman operates a one woman production studio encompassing the myriad roles of director, actress, costumer, lighting specialist and cinematographer.

Untitled Film Still #60 is a superb example of Sherman’s ability to inhabit, recreate, and reframe the archetypal woman of her choosing. The woman in the image is not a self-portrait, but rather, is a portrait of a very specific cultural expectation of woman. As stereotypes, the women in Sherman’s images are the most diluted and commonly-accessible Western manifestations of female archetypes— a hero, a vixen, a femme fatale, a jilted lover, an ingénue. The strength of archetypes lies in their being naturally accepted as universal truths, their origin forever mythical and thus immune from being disproven.

Like Warhol’s repetitive silkscreened cataloguing of soup types, Sherman presents the inventory of female stereotypes perpetuated in B-movies, film noir, and horror movies. By doing so, Sherman’s Film Stills transform viewers’ initial understanding of the images as plausible takes from a vaguely recognizable movie into a source of self-consciousness upon realizing the underlying social critique. Untitled Film Still #60 deftly exhibits this dichotomy and Sherman’s incomparable ability to render the real as fictitious and the fabricated as truth.