Sherman started the 69 black-and-white ““Film Stills’’ in 1977. She was 23 and had just moved to Manhattan with her boyfriend at the time, artist Robert Longo. ““I had friends who worked at Barnes & Noble,’’ she recalls, ““and they would bring home tons of trashy film anthologies of grade-Z movies, with every kind of film still. What you’d see, primarily, was a woman’s expression, a woman’s moment, but implying something else.’’ You know: a blonde in the kitchen, who looks like she’s about to poison hubby. At about the same time, Longo told her that she spent so much time dressing in front of a mirror that she should photograph herself - which she did, in every ““Film Still.’’ She took the pictures with her camera on a tripod and a 20-foot shutter-release cable she hand-clicked or stepped on. (Fun with ““Film Stills’’: see if you can spot the cable.) A haunting, postmodern existentialism pervades these deceptively simple pictures: each features a fictitious movie actress, at a phantom plot juncture, in nonexistent advertising for a movie never made. Sherman says the series was originally meant to track ““the same actress at different times: when she was younger and more naive; then a pouty, Brigitte Bardot phase, and later, when she was more haggard, and her career was on the wane.''
Sherman herself grew up on Long Island, a bit naive. ““Once a year my friends and I would sneak into New York City - which my parents thought very dangerous - to go to department stores and try on clothes,’’ she says. In college in Buffalo, Sherman flunked her first photography course and made mostly pedestrian paintings until she started to hang with Longo.
The ““Film Stills’’ were finished in 1980. Shown in New York almost instantly, they struck a chord with the art audience by blending irony, feminism, a media critique and identity-shifting into catchy images. Sherman’s work grew larger, more complex and more grotesque. It parodied old masters and blossomed - photographic purists would say festered - into full color. Then, in the mid-’80s, ““I started feeling uncomfortable about being successful. I wanted to make something that would be difficult for some collector to hang over his couch.’’ She ordered anatomically correct body-part models from a medical catalog, staged them in frightening configurations and photographed them. But collectors still loved the work, as they’ve loved almost every inventive series she’s done, right up to the most recent ““Untitled Masks.’’ In her rise to stardom, Sherman has also become a feminist icon. But, she says, ““I didn’t set out to investigate women’s issues. I feel a little put-on-the-spot when I have to stand up for those theory feminists. I’m an intuitive feminist. I’m an artist.''
Sherman is not, however, a born director. She says she was flattered into making ““Office Killer’’ during the rage for artist-directors like Julian Schnabel. The film, a black comedy with Carol Kane, Molly Ringwald and Jeanne Tripplehorn, currently languishes on Miramax’s shelf with no official release date. (Unofficially, the date is waning toward never.) ““Office Killer’’ still may survive some disastrous focus-group screenings and sneak into a couple of art houses. But Sherman says another movie ““is certainly not something I’m going to run out and do again. I realize now how grateful I am to be able to work alone, at my own pace, in the photography studio.’’ Besides, she made 13 sets of the ““Film Stills,’’ and there are lots more museums out there. The possibilities couldn’t happen to a nicer artist.
