Cindy Sherman
Photographs only herself, and has never once made a self-portrait.
Cindy Sherman was born at Glen Ridge in New Jersey in 1954 and studied at Buffalo. The Untitled Film Stills, made between 1977 and 1980, are sixty-nine black and white photographs in which she poses as female character types from films that do not exist — the whole series was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Everything since has used the same method and none of it is autobiographical: the centrefolds, the history portraits, the fairy tales, the society portraits, the clowns, with Sherman as photographer, model, stylist and make-up artist, working alone.
Editions are the whole question. The Film Stills were originally issued in editions of ten at a small size and later reprinted at larger sizes as separate editions, so the same image exists in several distinct forms and the size and edition, not the picture, identify the work. Later series are colour, often very large, and chromogenic prints of that scale are sensitive to light and to mounting. Signature, edition number and date are normally in ink on the verso. Metro Pictures and Hauser and Wirth documentation is the usual reference.
If you own a work by Cindy Sherman
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.