CINDY SHERMAN — The Hasselblad Award 1999, Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, 2000

Cindy Sherman, The Hasselblad Award 1999. Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, 2000. Hardcover; 46 pages, 21.5 × 34 cm; red boards with white typography, blind-stamped title text and small photographic inset; colour and black-and-white reproductions throughout.

Published in conjunction with Cindy Sherman receiving the 1999 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, presented in Göteborg on 4 March 2000 alongside an exhibition of her work at the Hasselblad Center.

There is a particularly good Y2K reading of this publication. Sherman arrives at the end of the twentieth century having spent more than twenty years demonstrating that photographic identity is something assembled: costume, pose, makeup, lighting, genre, expression and camera angle. Her Untitled Film Stills had already borrowed the codes of Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European cinema to produce characters whose identities appear familiar even though neither the women nor the films actually existed.

Then comes 1999. Within a few years, digital cameras, image-editing software, webcams and eventually social media would make the constructed photographic self an everyday condition rather than an avant-garde proposition. Sherman wasn’t predicting Instagram, of course, but looking at her practice from the threshold of 2000 makes something unusually clear: she had already treated identity as an interface before interfaces began organising identity.

That gives this small award book an interesting double direction. It officially looks backward, institutionalising Sherman as one of the major photographers of the twentieth century. But visually it points forward. The book moves from early black-and-white transformations and contact-sheet sequences through dolls, prosthetic bodies and staged scenes. The person gradually becomes less stable. Photography stops functioning as evidence of who somebody is and becomes a system for producing versions of somebody.

Even the Hasselblad context contains a productive contradiction. This is one of photography’s major institutional honours, yet it is being given to an artist whose importance rests partly on dismantling the assumption that photography delivers an authentic subject. And then there is the object itself. The bright red cover, oversized lower-case cindy / sherman, tiny inserted photograph and near-corporate typography feel unexpectedly close to late-1990s identity systems, product packaging and early digital branding.

An analogue book sitting directly on the threshold of the digital self. Sherman’s characters had always been manufactured. What changed after 2000 was that everyone else acquired the tools to manufacture themselves.

Condition: Good. Light rubbing, handling and minor marks to red boards, with some edge and corner wear consistent with age. Interior appears clean and well preserved.

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