Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
....I didn’t really have ideas of what I wanted to do with painting. That was when I thought, “Why am I wasting my time elaborately copying things when I could use a camera?”
I want that choked-up feeling in your throat which maybe comes from despair or teary-eyed sentimentality: conveying intangible emotions.
The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-informed work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.
I think of becoming a different person. I look into a mirror next to the camera... it’s trancelike. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens... When I see what I want, my intuition takes over.
I would read theoretical stuff about my work and think, “What? Where did they get that?” The work was so intuitive for me, I didn’t know where it was coming from. So I thought I had better not say anything or I’d blow it.
I didn’t care much about the print quality. The photographs were supposed to look like they cost fifty cents.
I didn’t think of what I was doing as political: to me it was a way to make the best out of what I liked to do privately, which was to dress up.
It has nothing to do with me. I work with myself, that’s my material somehow, but the finished photograph has more to offer than reflections of my “personality”... My photographs are certainly not self-portraits or representations of myself, though unfortunately people always keep saying they are.
