Fragments and Reflections
Cindy Sherman, National Portrait Gallery, until 15 September 2019 Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, Hayward Gallery, February – May 2019
When she was about eight years old, Cindy Sherman began compiling a family photo album. She called it ‘A Cindy Book’, drew a circle around herself if she was pictured alongside others and added a pithy caption below each of the 26 images: ‘That’s me’. As a college student in 1975 she rediscovered the half-finished album, which documents her journey from tot to pre-teen, and completed it. This memoir captures her childlike sense of wonder that she could exist in multiple guises – that there’s a disconnect between who a person is and how they appear.
The UK’s first Cindy Sherman retrospective opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery two months after a retrospective of Diane Arbus, the grande dame of female photographers, closed across the river at the Hayward Gallery. Sherman lives and works in New York, where Arbus was born in 1923 and committed suicide, aged 48, in 1971. Both have made images that are familiar yet haunting – snapshots of a life, frozen in time, the world beyond the frame tantalisingly out of reach. Both draw attention to the deceptive nature of appearance. Both invite speculation when it comes to narrative. But there’s one notable difference: Sherman photographs herself, alone and unobserved in her studio, playing a part in front of a full-length mirror; Arbus photographed real people who regularly saw her coming, a photographer in plain sight, out on the street.
Arbus began experimenting with photography in the early 1940s and continued to take pictures while collaborating on commercial work for fashion magazines with her husband Allan Arbus – she was the art director and stylist, he the photographer and technician. By 1956, however, she’d had enough of the glossies and turned her attention to the gritty streets of
New York. She aimed her 35mm camera at wide-eyed tourists in Times Square, sun-seekers at Coney Island and other ordinary folk she found in the city’s subway, diners and cinemas.
Unlike her contemporaries who did all they could to conceal their cameras – Walker Evans hiding it beneath his coat, Helen Levitt using a rightangle lens – Arbus interacted with the men, women and children she photographed. ‘For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture,’ she once said. She was curious about her subjects and, in catching them alone, eyes flashing towards the camera, captured a moment that looks a lot like introspection – a glimpse of a reflection. Of course, what they’re really doing is watching Arbus, watching them.
Sherman stars in each of her witty photographs but her portraits of imaginary people have little to do with her personality. As Paul Moorhouse, the curator of the National Portrait Gallery show, is at pains to say, these are not selfies. In fact, there’s just one work – Untitled #479 (1975), which she created while studying at the State University College at Buffalo – that reveals Sherman’s process of chameleon-like transformation, in this case from drab, bespectacled student to cigarette-smoking vamp. A series of 23 plates shows the gradual erasure of her identity as she cosmetically manipulates her features, starting with the whitening of her face – the creation of a blank canvas. Lips are painted, cheeks powdered with rouge, Twiggy-esque eyelashes and elegantly arched eyebrows drawn on in pencil with a steady hand. A star-shaped beauty spot, back-brushed hair and a black choker complete the look. It was while studying art and then photography in Buffalo that Sherman turned her fascination with shapeshifting into an art form.
Ever since, she has presented the viewer with her alter egos fully formed. And yet, through goofy expressions and over-the-top make-up, she alludes to the fact that it’s all a charade. Untitled A – E (1975) comprises five headshots of herself in both female and male roles, confiding in the viewer with a sly smile, the tilt of a head and almost cross-eyed pupils – not to mention that coloured-in monobrow. What you see is a veneer,
a masquerade – she knows it, and she knows you know it. Sherman and Fleabag have quite a bit in common.
Arbus, too, was interested in documenting performance. Yet for her, doing so involved making herself more known. In the late 1950s she traded spontaneous portraits of passers-by on the street for carefully chosen subjects in intimate settings – and her 35mm camera for a more accurate square-format model that squeezed the subject into the centre of the frame. She visited circuses and shot cha-cha dancers and trapeze artists. Wrestlers in the ring, NYC (1958) shines a spotlight on a stage while casting a shadow over a crowd. A series of sensitive portraits show drag queens applying lipstick in a mirror, dressed in open kimonos and fingering silk gloves. These are works that grapple with themes of identity, gender and – ultimately – how we choose to present ourselves to the world.
Arbus’s documentary-like photographs provide sneak peaks into secret worlds, whether a backstage dressing room or a bedroom. ‘I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside,’ she wrote in her second application for a Guggenheim grant. ‘One milieu leads to another. I want to be able to follow.’ Even some of her more chance-like outdoor shots give us a glimpse of private moments we feel we ought not to be witnessing. Couple arguing, Coney Island (1960), for example. Who started it, I wonder. Who said what to whom? The woman’s fingers appear to be curling into a fist, but will it come to blows?
It’s possible to picture Arbus’s photographs from their titles: Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, NYC (1956), say, or Girl with schoolbooks stepping onto the curb, NYC (1957). Sherman’s photographs, on the other hand, are anonymous – and in themselves highly ambiguous – which leaves all the more room for us to interpret what we see. She may have said in one of her notebooks that they are ‘not about anything’ but each image leaks emotion, sparks a story.
After arriving in New York in the summer of 1977, Sherman indulged her passion for cinema and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Jean
Luc Godard with her breakthrough black-and-white Untitled Film Stills (1977-80). Modelled on promotional shots for films released in the 1940s and 1950s, each work features an invented tableaux and Sherman as an archetypal female lead in a costume and wig. She plants small clues, fragments that ignite our imagination about the subject’s past, present and future. As Moorhouse says, ‘The job of the observer is to fill in the gaps.’ So, is the pinafored woman at the kitchen sink clutching her stomach with desire or dread? Is the letter in the hands of the lady with the lustrous lips full of good news or bad? What about the girl in the plaid skirt, standing on the side of the road in the dead of night, packed suitcase by her feet – is she waiting for her lover, with whom she plans to elope, or simply running away from home and hoping to catch a ride? Didn’t her parents tell her not to get in a car with strangers?
Arbus was one of the first photographers to use film as a subject, spending much of her time in New York movie theatres shooting audiences, ushers and whatever film noir or horror movie was showing. One photograph captures the cinema-goers at 42nd Street, perched in steeply raked seats, a shaft of light projecting the film onto the screen. Another shows a screaming woman (on screen) covering her face with her bloodied hands. Arbus was as fascinated by the faces of normal people as the film stars they paid to see.
Sherman experimented with other existing art forms, quoting and critiquing imagery from contemporary mass media. As she once said, ‘I wanted to make something out of the culture, and also to make fun of the culture as I was doing it.’ After graduating from art school she created Cover Girls (1976), five works that each comprise a trio of ‘covers’ of women’s magazines: an original cover; Sherman transformed to resemble the model; and the same impersonation, except with Sherman parodying the model’s expression to emphasise its pretense and the impossible standards that Vogue, Cosmopolitan et al promote. Her ornately framed History Portraits (1988-90) – which she created during a fellowship in Rome – are inspired by older cultural sources, namely Old Master paintings. She photographed herself in the guise of aristocrats and ladies of leisure, using cheap fabrics and conspicuous prosthetics that alert viewers to the artifice: her rendition
of the Madonna and Child, for example, features a bulbous fake breast. Most evoke a general sense of a particular period – whether renaissance or nineteenth century – but Untitled #204 (1989) closely resembles Ingres’s Madame Moitessier (1856), which the National Gallery has lent to the National Portrait Gallery. We may take history painting to be a reliable record, but Sherman throws that assumption into question.
Sherman tackles all sorts of social mores. Her Sex Pictures (1992-96) – a rare series from which she’s absent – appropriate pornographic imagery but, with the use of dolls and fake body parts, present a dehumanised scene devoid of sexuality. It feels as though she’s testing our limits: even if you think you enjoy porn, you probably can’t handle this. By ramping up the absurdity of her images, she also points out how artificial and empty the industry is. Her digital Society Portraits (2008) provoke questions about age and social status. She portrays sophisticated matrons against opulent backdrops, with coiffured hairstyles and lobes pierced with pearls. Past their prime, they’re turning to cosmetic surgery to maintain an illusion of their youth – but how far are they willing to go? They may seem poised but the downward curl of a lip and the crimson tinge to the eyes hint at an insecurity behind the carefully constructed façade.
Sherman’s photographs teach us not to take what we see at face value. Her shrewd observations of social types reflect the fact that, to an extent, we’re all playing a part on life’s stage. (Her most recent series, exhibited here for the first time, document today’s fashion influencers in all their faux nonchalance and look-at-me clothing.) Arbus photographed real people, from schoolchildren and taxi-drivers to film stars and those at the fringes of society: a Russian midget called Miss Makrina and a contortionist who could swivel his body around to face in the opposite direction of his feet. Although their practices were wildly divergent, Arbus and Sherman share a fascination with difference – not only between human beings but also between our outward appearance and our inner workings. Each image made by these two highly talented and fiercely independent women fizzes with life, teases us with a loose thread, the opening line of a script, either a true story or fiction.