Collection: Sex Pictures

Overview
Cindy Sherman's 1992 series Sex Pictures marks a decisive pivot from her earlier self-staged portraits to a theatre of bodies built from mannequins, prosthetics, and studio props. The images are large-scale, glossy color photographs that present close-up, often confrontational views of genitals, orifices, and fragmented torsos. Faces never appear. By withholding the human countenance, the usual anchor of identity and empathy, Sherman pushes viewers into a field where desire, disgust, and curiosity collide. The series simultaneously invokes and dismantles pornography's visual codes, turning recognizable cues of erotic display into tableaux of artificial flesh and disquieting compositions.

Materials and Process
The bodies are constructed from medical training dummies, sex-shop prosthetics, wigs, and costume parts, combined with makeup and studio effects. Sherman stages these assemblages on seamless backdrops under controlled lighting that alternately flattens and exaggerates texture: plasticky skin, molded seams, glossy surfaces. Cropping is severe, pushing forms to the edge of legibility. Color is saturated yet chilly, with a clinical, catalog-like polish that hints at commercial photography while refusing its seductions. The overt seams and joins, nipples that do not align, torsos that mismatch, limbs that stop short, keep the fiction nakedly visible and insist on artifice as the subject.

Visual Language and Themes
Sex Pictures revolves around the collapse of erotic spectacle into abjection. The camera lingers on orifices and protrusions but denies narrative, romance, and the reassurance of a whole body. Gender is unstable: male and female parts appear spliced, exaggerated, or ambiguous, making anatomical difference feel like costume rather than essence. The images undermine the pornographic gaze by stripping away the person who would be its object and replacing her with objects that overperform the signs of sex. Pleasure flickers, then recoils; the viewer is caught between attraction to surface and repulsion at the inert, uncanny material. Sherman's staging opens onto questions of power and consumption, who is being used, and by whom, while also implicating the viewer in the act of looking. The photographs operate as critiques of commodified desire and as meditations on the body as a made thing, constructed in culture and in pictures.

Context and Reception
Unveiled in the climate of early-1990s culture wars, arguably shaped by censorship battles around erotic and religious imagery, the series was exhibited at Metro Pictures in New York in 1992 and quickly became a flashpoint. Some critics condemned the work as gratuitously explicit; others saw a rigorous feminist refusal of soft-focus eroticism. The lack of human subjects confounded expectations of portraiture and of Sherman's own earlier practice, forcing a reconsideration of what counts as a subject in photography. The work resonated with contemporaneous discourse on the abject and appeared alongside related art in institutional settings that grappled with desire, disgust, and the politics of representation.

Legacy
Sex Pictures consolidated Sherman's shift away from using her own body and expanded her vocabulary into sculpture-by-proxy and studio construction. It influenced subsequent debates about the photographic body, the ethics of looking, and the porous line between pornography and critique. The series paved the way for her later forays into horror-inflected and grotesque imagery, and it continues to be a touchstone for artists exploring gender, identity, and the manufactured image. By turning sex into a meticulously staged artifact, Sherman laid bare the mechanics of the gaze and the cultural scaffolding that makes bodies legible, and desirable, in pictures.