Fatherhood Quote by Cindy Sherman

Sherman’s blunt inventory of her father’s prejudices lands like an anti-portrait: unsparing, specific, and deliberately unredeemed. The piling up of targets - Jews, blacks, Catholics - isn’t rhetorical flourish so much as a factual rhythm of contamination, the way bigotry metastasizes across categories until it becomes a worldview. The phrase “even” is doing quiet work here, implying a hierarchy of expected hate: some prejudices were so normalized in her environment that it takes extra emphasis to note how far it went. That casual escalation is the point.

Coming from a photographer who built her career on disguises, masks, and the instability of identity, the confession reads as origin story without sentimentality. Sherman’s art has long treated “types” - the ingénue, the victim, the clown, the society woman - as cultural costumes that look natural only because we’ve been trained to see them that way. This quote suggests an early education in how “normal” gets manufactured inside a household: not through grand political speeches, but through everyday, self-centered talk that teaches a child which people are to be caricatured, feared, or dismissed.

There’s also a strategic refusal to psychoanalyze him. She doesn’t offer trauma as explanation, or nostalgia as softener. She frames prejudice as character: “horrible,” “self-centred.” That matters because it denies the audience the comfort of complexity. The subtext is a boundary: if you want to understand how images stereotype, start with the real-life systems that do it first, at home, out loud.