Untitled #339 [Broken Dolls]

With Broken Dolls (1999), Sherman returned to black-and-white photography. Similar to the Sex Pictures (1992) and the Horror and Surrealistic Pictures (1994–1996) series, this work features a sequence of obscenely destroyed human figures. Unlike the Sex Pictures, however, the dolls in this series are not a surrogate for the human body, but lifeless objects that as such, become the actual subject. Between game and violence, between a childish appetite for destruction and a perverse fantasy for slaughter, the dolls take on a sinister life of their own.