Cindy Sherman

Cynthia "Cindy" Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Early life and education

She was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of five children. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island, where her father worked as an engineer for Grumman Aircraft. Her mother taught children with learning difficulties to read.

Sherman became interested in the visual arts at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. Frustrated with what she saw as the medium's limitations, she abandoned the form and took up photography. "[T]here was nothing more to say [through painting]", she later recalled. "I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead." Sherman has said about this time: "One of the reasons I started photographing myself was that supposedly in the spring one of my teachers would take the class out to a place near Buffalo where there were waterfalls and everybody romps around without clothes on and takes pictures of each other. I thought, ‘Oh, I don't want to do this. But if we're going to have to go to the woods I better deal with it early.’ Luckily we never had to do that." She spent the remainder of her college education focused on photography. Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credits with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms. At college she met Robert Longo, who encouraged her to record her process of "dolling up" for parties.