"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
Sherman is describing a vanishing act that only looks like self-effacement. Her photos are full of her body, her face, her wigs and prosthetics, yet the "I" keeps slipping away. That tension is the engine of her work: she uses herself as raw material, then refuses the viewer the payoff of biography. In a culture trained to treat the artist as the secret key to the image, Sherman locks that door and hands you a mirror instead.
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.
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 | Cindy Sherman — quote as listed on the Wikiquote page: "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." |
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