Collection: Centerfolds

Overview
Cindy Sherman's Centerfolds (1981) is a suite of staged color photographs that adopts the horizontal, two-page spread of a magazine centerfold only to subvert it. Each image presents Sherman herself as a different female character, teenager, ingénue, housewife, office worker, caught in a moment of private vulnerability or interior reflection. Rather than offering erotic availability, the pictures withhold access through averted gazes, tense body language, and ambiguous settings, turning the centerfold format into a site of psychological drama and critical scrutiny of the gaze.

Commission and controversy
The series originated as a commission for Artforum, which planned to reproduce the images as fold-out spreads. Fearing the photographs could be read as exploitative despite their critique, the magazine declined to publish them. The decision became a flash point in debates about feminism, representation, and the ethics of looking, while inadvertently sharpening the project’s reception: the works entered the gallery as objects that both traffic in and resist the codes of mass-media display. The photographs are now often referred to as the Horizontals to emphasize their formal strategy over the magazine lineage.

Visual language
Sherman moved decisively into large-scale color, using chromogenic prints to heighten the sensory pull of domestic interiors, linoleum floors, wood paneling, patterned bedspreads, and fluorescent-lit corners, rendered in saturated oranges, nicotine yellows, and bruised blues. The horizontal format stretches bodies across the frame, echoing the ergonomics of a centerfold while disrupting its legibility with tight cropping, shallow depth of field, and off-center compositions. Props, telephones, torn newspaper clippings, smeared makeup, scattered shoes, operate as narrative fragments rather than definitive clues, suggesting stories without closing them down.

Narrative and themes
The series pivots on the tension between expectation and refusal. Viewers arrive with the cultural script of the centerfold, female exposure for a presumed male viewer, only to meet figures who are turned away, preoccupied, frightened, bored, or lost in thought. That deflection converts desire into curiosity and unease, implicating the viewer in the very mechanisms the work dissects. Identity appears as a performance constructed from the detritus of popular culture; each character is convincing yet unstable, a composite of cinematic shorthand, advertising tropes, and social roles that never fully cohere.

Sherman’s mise-en-scène gestures to film noir and melodrama, but the emphasis falls on affect rather than plot: dread, shame, anticipation, and reverie register through posture and light. The images invite ethical self-auditing, what story is being supplied, by whom, and to what end, aligning the work with feminist critiques of objectification while refusing illustration or didactic certainty.

Reception and legacy
First exhibited at Metro Pictures in 1981, Centerfolds consolidated Sherman’s position within the Pictures Generation and helped legitimize color photography’s large-scale, conceptually driven presence in the gallery. Individual images have become icons of late 20th-century art; one, featuring an orange-sweatered figure on a kitchen floor clutching a classified clipping, later set auction records for a photograph. The series influenced artists examining the politics of spectatorship and female subjectivity, from advertising deconstructions to contemporary performance for the camera.

Decades on, Centerfolds remains a primer in how format shapes meaning. By hijacking a mass-media template and reengineering it for ambivalence, Sherman exposed the fragile boundary between depiction and desire, showing how images script not only how bodies are seen, but how viewers learn to look.