CINDY SHERMAN — Photographic Work 1975–1995, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1995

Cindy Sherman, Photographic Work 1975–1995. Edited by Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander; essay by Elisabeth Bronfen. Schirmer Art Books / Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1995. Illustrated softcover with French-fold wrappers; 172 pages, 24 × 30 cm; 119 illustrations, 86 in colour; English-language edition. ISBN 3-88814-809-X.

Published for Sherman’s twenty-year retrospective, shown at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Malmö Konsthall and Kunstmuseum Luzern. The book moves from her earliest transformations through the Untitled Film Stills, colour photographs and the increasingly artificial, theatrical and grotesque bodies of the 1980s and ’90s.

But this particular copy has acquired another identity. Ex-library. Faded. Handled. Retained.

For Sherman, identity is never a fixed original waiting to be revealed. It is produced through costume, posture, framing, repetition and circumstance. Something similar has happened to this book. It left the publisher as one copy within an edition and subsequently passed through a library system: catalogued, shelved, handled, exposed to light and eventually released back into circulation.

The fading is especially good here. The already lurid red-and-yellow cover image has been altered by time into another version of itself. What would normally be described simply as loss of colour becomes evidence of duration. The image has undergone its own transformation without Sherman’s intervention.

The ex-library provenance pushes this further. A library copy has a peculiar double life: first as a published commodity, then as institutional property, then — once withdrawn — as an individual object carrying the residue of that classification system. The generic monograph becomes a specific copy.

That feels unusually appropriate for Sherman. There is another useful parallel in her long relationship with Schirmer/Mosel. The publisher did not reduce Sherman to one definitive career book. Her work repeatedly returned in newly edited forms — including The Complete Untitled Film Stills, Clowns and History Portraits. The same practice continually reappears under another cover, another sequence, another title. In that sense the artist monograph behaves almost like one of Sherman’s characters. The source remains recognizable, but the presentation changes. And this copy adds one more version.

Sherman as subject. Sherman as publication. Publication as library object. Library object returned to the market. Its flaws are therefore not incidental to the copy. They are what distinguish it from the cleaner one beside it. The fading records exposure. The library history records placement. Handling records readership. Condition becomes biography.

Condition: Ex-library copy. Structurally fine, with pronounced fading and colour shift to covers, general rubbing, scratches, edge and corner wear and other traces of institutional handling and circulation. Library markings present. Interior remains sound. Sold specifically as an altered, circulated copy whose condition forms part of its character.

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