Over the course of three years in the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman created 69 black and white photographs in a series known as the Untitled Film Stills, now recognized among the most significant contributions to feminist artistic discourse in the twentieth century. Each photograph is an elaborately staged self-portrait of the artist, inspired in part by roles played by actresses in Hollywood and European films. Sherman’s photographs are ambiguous, with her face often locked in a neutral expression. She is costumed in generic clothes and pictured in nonspecific locations, rendering the images both familiar and open-ended. Instead of offering an explicit narrative, the Film Stills require viewers to fill in the blanks. Methods of interpreting these images have as much to do with the influence of popular media on a collective social conscious as they do with our own personal histories.

–From the Glenstone Field Guide