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PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.25 in. / 164 pgs / 69 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2003 p. 177   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780870705076 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CDN $67.50

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

Essays by Peter Galassi and Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

The photobook that defined a generation: 69 black-and-white photographs in Cindy Sherman’s seminal cinematic style, made between 1977 and 1980

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.

Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Cindy Sherman is a ground-breaking American photographer, born in 1954. She began her "Film Stills" series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She is represented by Metro Pictures gallery in New York.

"Untitled Film Still #12" (1978) is reproduced from "Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills."

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/26/2016

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, #3

From 1977 to 1980, Cindy Sherman produced the groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills series of 70 black-and-white vintage publicity-still-like photographs starring herself. With this body of work, she changed the game forever. Now in her sixties, Sherman is poised to unveil a new body of work that was profiled this weekend in the New York Times: "With her pictures of women her own age, Ms. Sherman seems to have returned to a tenderness that hasn’t been seen in her work for the last several decades," Blake Gopnik writes. "She describes the images as 'the most sincere things that I’ve done — that aren’t full of irony, or caricature, or cartooniness — since the Film Stills.' It could even be that her mature leading ladies should be thought of as the aspiring starlets of those Film Stills 40 years on, after they’ve achieved success and come out the other side." Untitled Film Still #3, (1977) is reproduced from the MoMA classic. continue to blog


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| CAN $65

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| CAN $34.5

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ISBN: 9780971219588
USD $20.00
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Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

CINDY SHERMAN: THE COMPLETE UNTITLED FILM STILLS

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ISBN: 9780870705076
USD $50.00
| CAN $67.5

Pub Date: 10/2/2003
Active | Out of stock