"I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear"
About this Quote
The line about anonymity lands as a critique of how femininity gets read as a set of interchangeable scripts. Sherman appears as the career girl, the starlet, the housewife, the victim, the grotesque; the point isn't that she can become anyone, it's that the visual economy keeps asking women to be legible in the same few ways. "They aren't self-portraits" is a rebuke to the confessional expectation, especially in photography, where the camera is assumed to capture essence. Sherman shows how easily "essence" can be manufactured with lighting, posture, makeup, a familiar genre cue.
"Sometimes I disappear" isn't mystical; it's structural. The more perfectly she inhabits the codes, the less room there is for an authentic subject to appear. Authorship dissolves into performance, and performance into stereotype. Context matters: coming out of late-70s/80s postmodernism and feminist critique, Sherman makes the most personal tool she has-her own image-into evidence that the personal is already prewritten by culture.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: Playful Disruption of Digital Media (Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath, 2018) modern compilationISBN: 9789811018916 · ID: NbFUDwAAQBAJ
Evidence:
Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath. 6 Playing Many Selves Artists like Cindy Sherman have played ... I feel I'm anonymous in my work ... “ When I look at the pictures , I never see myself ; they aren't self - portraits . Sometimes I disappear ... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Sherman, Cindy. (2026, February 10). I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-feel-im-anonymous-in-my-work-when-i-look-at-the-139157/
Chicago Style
Sherman, Cindy. "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear." FixQuotes. February 10, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-feel-im-anonymous-in-my-work-when-i-look-at-the-139157/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear." FixQuotes, 10 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-feel-im-anonymous-in-my-work-when-i-look-at-the-139157/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.





