Good Reads | The Camera Lies

Art / Exhibits / Profile / Photography

“I may be thinking about a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her,” Sherman has responded to questions about her inner thoughts during shooting. “There’s this distance. The image in the mirror becomes her—the image the camera gets on film. And the one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.” Just when you want to argue that photographs tell the truth, Sherman stops you cold. Most people know Sherman for her late 1970s series of photographs known collectively as Untitled Film Stills. The series title itself suggests that the pictures came from movies of the 1940s to 1960s, when studios would produce and distribute stills from their films. But the camera lies. You can make your own connections, but not a single one of the photos alludes to a specific film (at least according to Sherman). So, when you look at the fresh-faced girl of Untitled Film Still #12 and read the moxie on her face as the big, bad city looms above her, that entire back story sprang not from the picture but from your own head. To prove that identity is purely a construct, Sherman repeatedly invites you to construct one, and to realize you can’t help but accept. “Rather than explorations of inner psychology, her pictures are about the projection of personas and stereotypes that are deep-seated in our shared cultural imagination,” Respini explains.

Big Think: Why Cindy Sherman Doesn’t Want Your Pity [MoMA Exhibit]