Type 42: Fame Is the Name of the Game: Photographs by Anonymous

A selection of 120 black-and-white Type 42 Polaroids of Hollywood actresses photographed off a television screen by an unidentified photographer, discovered in 2012 by artist Jason Brinkerhoff and introduced here by Cindy Sherman.

In 2012, Brinkerhoff came across a collection of roughly 950 Polaroids made on Type 42 film, a stock introduced in 1955 and discontinued in 1992, each shot of a close-up on a television screen catching an actress mid-broadcast: Brigitte Bardot, Doris Day, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, Sophia Loren, Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, and others. Many prints carry the actress's name and sometimes a film title, inked along the border in the same distinctive hand, the photographer's only trace. Edited by Nicole Delmes and Susanne Zander of the Delmes & Zander gallery, which first exhibited the archive in Berlin in late 2014, the book reproduces 120 of the images.

Cindy Sherman's introductory essay reads the anonymous, obsessive body of work as, in her words, \"an exhaustive study of what it is to be a woman,\" and considers the ambiguity of an author whose gender and motive cannot be recovered from the archive alone. The book's title borrows a phrase attributed to the anonymous maker, found scrawled among the Polaroids.