CINDY SHERMAN — Cindy Sherman, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden / Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1997

Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman. Edited by Talitha Schoon and Karel Schampers. Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden / Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1996–97. Large-format softcover; 176 pages, 20 × 32 cm; colour and black-and-white reproductions throughout. ISBN 90-6918-165-7.

Substantial exhibition catalogue published for the travelling Cindy Sherman exhibition originating at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1996 and subsequently shown in Madrid, Bilbao and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 19 January–23 March 1997.

The book arrives at a particularly important moment for both Sherman and photography. By the mid-1990s, staged and conceptual photography had moved decisively beyond a specialist photographic market and into the centre of contemporary art. Sherman is almost a case study in that transition: her works initially appeared in photography auctions, but were subsequently moved into contemporary-art sales where they performed much more strongly. In December 1995, MoMA acquired the complete Untitled Film Stills, presenting the entire series in 1997. Photography was no longer simply the medium through which the work was classified; the photograph had become the contemporary artwork.

Sherman’s importance to that shift lies partly in how little her photographs depend on conventional ideas of photographic truth. The camera records something that has already been constructed. Costume, makeup, lighting, gesture, cropping, props and setting are assembled before the shutter is released. The Untitled Film Stills deliberately resemble fragments from 1950s and ’60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art cinema, but belong to no actual film. They appear to have a before and an after without supplying either.

That relationship to cinema is also what gives Sherman’s compositions their unusual narrative tension. Each image behaves like evidence extracted from a story that never existed. The viewer supplies the missing narrative from visual conventions already learned through movies, advertising, fashion photography and magazines — a particularly clear form of postmodernism: not inventing an entirely new visual language, but exposing how thoroughly existing languages already organise what we see.

This catalogue is especially good at showing the distance Sherman travelled. Early photographs based around facial transformation and invented characters sit alongside the cinematic Film Stills, later colour work, masks, prostheses and the increasingly artificial bodies of the 1990s. By the later images, representation begins to break down: the convincing human performance is replaced by mannequins, fragments and fabricated surfaces. The construction has become visible.

1997 was also the year Sherman received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, with three of her colour photographs acquired for the Museum Ludwig collection. The Baden-Baden exhibition therefore sits within a moment of unusually concentrated European institutional recognition. The original £25 publisher’s-price sticker remains on the rear cover: a major artist at the point of institutional and market consolidation, still circulating through the ordinary mechanisms of the museum bookshop.

Condition: Good. General surface rubbing and scratching to wrappers, edge and corner wear, and light handling consistent with age and the large format. Interior pages appear clean and well preserved. Original publisher’s £25 price sticker retained to rear cover.

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