Collection: Society Portraits

Overview
Cindy Sherman's 2008 series Society Portraits presents a suite of large-scale color photographs in which the artist inhabits the roles of affluent, middle-aged to older women, figures who might be found at benefits, on museum boards, or in society pages. True to her long-standing practice, Sherman acts as model, director, costumer, and makeup artist, using wigs, prosthetics, and elaborate wardrobe to become a cross-section of high-society archetypes. The pictures were made and printed at a monumental scale that echoes grand historical portraiture, granting each character imposing presence while inviting a close reading of surface and detail.

Visual Language
Sherman stages her characters against digitally composited backgrounds that resemble opulent interiors, classical columns, or lush landscapes. These are deliberately generic, the kind of spaces that signal taste and wealth without pointing to a specific address, creating a zone of social aspiration rather than documentary specificity. The lighting is polished but unforgiving, heightening the textures of foundation, lipstick, and bronzer. Jewelry flashes, hair is set and sprayed, couture fabrics gleam; yet the hands, necks, and posture often betray age and effort. Sherman’s expressions land between practiced poise and private strain, tight smiles, appraising gazes, a momentary drift of attention, suggesting people who know they are being looked at and are accustomed to managing that look.

Themes and Tone
The series probes the performance of class and femininity, paying special attention to the pressures of aging in a culture that equates female power with youth and polish. Cosmetic intervention is hinted at through taut skin, swollen lips, and frozen features, but Sherman refuses easy ridicule. The photographs oscillate between satire and empathy: the characters are funny because the artifice is obvious, and moving because the artifice is obviously necessary. Wealth functions here as armor and theater, carefully chosen clothes, rooms, and poses, with cracks where vulnerability shows through. By appropriating the conventions of old-master portraiture and society photography, the images expose how status is manufactured through image-making, then mirror that manufacture back to the viewer.

Technique and Art History
Sherman’s digital compositing underscores the constructed nature of these identities while echoing the retouched, staged portraits that circulate in magazines and on institutional websites. The scale and framing recall aristocratic likenesses by painters such as Sargent or Gainsborough, updated with the cool surface of contemporary photography. That tension, between painterly grandeur and photographic hyperrealism, complicates the viewer’s relationship to authenticity. Every element reads as both sign and symptom: pearls, brocade, manicured nails, and the studied hand-on-hip gesture become citations of past portraiture and of modern branding.

Context and Reception
Debuting on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis, Society Portraits captured a late-capitalist moment of gilded self-presentation. Shown in the same art-world circuits frequented by some of its implicit subjects, the series sharpened Sherman's long-running critique of spectatorship, aspiration, and the economies that support art. Critics noted the work’s precision and ambivalence, its ability to puncture pretension without dehumanizing its characters, and its continuity with earlier cycles, from Untitled Film Stills to Head Shots and Clowns. Society Portraits stands as a keystone in Sherman’s exploration of masquerade, showing how identity is curated through images, and how images, in turn, become the stage where power, anxiety, and desire play out.