Untitled Film Still #11 [Untitled Film Stills]

The 69 photographs of the Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) series are the best-known and most important works from Sherman’s early period and mark a significant turning point in her career. With this series, Sherman began referring directly to the cinema: to the pictorial world of Hollywood, to American B movies, to Film Noir and to European Auteur Film. The prototypical image of film stills goes back to the publicity pictures used by the film industry for promotion and advertising purposes, among others. Sherman uses such images to investigate and illustrate the complex representational mechanisms in modern media culture. These photographs show no restaged motifs from existing movies, but fictitious scenes derived from a collective pictorial memory dominated by film. The enormous resonance to this series can also be understood in terms of its relevance to the media-critical discussion of post-modernism, which revealed the perception of reality as a construction determined by the media.