Weekly Selfie 2 - Ricky Ochoa

 

Weekly Selfie 2 - Ricky Ochoa

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #92, 1981

Headache Get Up, Ricky Ochoa, 9/12/2024

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #93, 1981

What?, Ricky Ochoa, 9/12/24

Quotes from "The Cindy Sherman Effect" by Phoebe Hoban for ArtNews

1. "By deconstructing and reinventing portraiture, which in itself was something of a dead genre when she arrived on the scene, Sherman influenced not only photographers but also painters and performance and video artists. And by limiting her subject matter strictly to herself, while at the same time excavating countless permutations, she inspired a generation of younger artists to explore their own identities across a range of mediums."

2. "Sherman’s dazzling skill as a perpetual shape-shifter is perhaps her major contribution to contemporary art. A less conspicuous but equally important legacy involves the way her work has permanently blurred the line between fine art and photography."

Responses

1. Due to taking a lot of portraits of herself, she got many variations about identity and self-discovery that inspired other young photographers, painters, performance artists, and video artists to do the same. This is probably where the modern-day selfies began to take shape.

2. She often mixes both photography and fine art to create hyperrealistic images that can be pleasing to look at or chaotic depending on what she experiments with.

Quotes from "New York Times | The Ugly Beauty of Cindy Sherman"

1. In fact, her images are so foundational to feminist art criticism, to notions of the “male gaze,” that it can be difficult to see them for themselves — they come to us encrusted with theory.

2. "But Sherman is vocal, even prickly, about one point. The photographs are not self-portraits, nor do they depict her fantasies. She uses herself because it’s simpler, she says. She can push herself harder than any model, and she can avoid small talk."

Responses

1. When women are represented in media or in paintings from hundreds of years, they are sexualized by having ideal body proportions for the pleasure of men to look at and take control over. It paints an unrealistic standard of what they need to find in a woman.

2. Sherman uses photographs to not just sit there and look pretty but to tell a story and give meaning to the picture.