Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

MoMA's dedicated volume reproduces all sixty-nine black-and-white photographs of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) for the first time in their entirety and in the artist's own sequence. It is the series that established her as a central figure in postwar American photography.

Made in Sherman's apartment and on the streets of New York using herself as the sole model, the photographs cast her as an unnamed actress in stills from movies that were never made. They draw on the visual grammar of 1950s and 60s Hollywood, film noir and European art cinema. This 2003 publication carries an essay by MoMA curator Peter Galassi. It was the first to present the full sequence as the artist intended it to be read, rather than the selections that had circulated in earlier surveys and exhibitions.

Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954. She has built her entire body of work around self-staged photographs in which she is always a type or a character rather than herself. The library also holds MoMA's 2012 retrospective monograph Cindy Sherman, which surveys thirty-five years of her work across every major series. This earlier volume is a narrower, single-series companion devoted entirely to the Untitled Film Stills.