Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) is a series of 70 black-and-white photographs by American artist Cindy Sherman, made soon after her move to New York and centered on staged, self-performed female roles that mimic the aesthetics of mid-century movie publicity images.
Sherman started the project at age 23 to examine how mass media supplies ready-made templates for female identity. The photographs move through familiar stereotypes—ingénue, working girl, vamp, lonely housewife—yet resist fixed interpretation; each figure appears to have entered a role already scripted, though not fully known to her. In this sense the series sits within the late-1970s postmodern strategies often associated with the Pictures Generation, where artists treated existing image culture as material to be reworked, quoted, and questioned. Critics have also connected the project to second-wave feminist debates about representation: the photographs invite viewers to notice how femininity is produced through styling, gesture, and context, and how the act of looking can carry power.
The visual language borrows cinema’s grammar while withholding the backstory and cues that would explain the scene. Many frames capture "in-between" moments—someone pausing in a doorway, turning at a kitchen sink, or scanning an empty street—suggesting a plot that never arrives. Sherman often places her figure slightly off-center, uses mirrors, windows, and doorjambs as internal frames, and repeats the off-camera glance that directs attention beyond the photograph’s edge. Locations shift from cramped apartments to sidewalks, beaches, and highways, with sessions staged across Manhattan and Long Island and a small subset made during a trip to Arizona. The monochrome palette, visible grain, and simple lighting (available window light, household lamps, occasional harsher sources) create a world of ordinary rooms and streets that still reads as cinematic.
Sherman operated as a "one-woman production"—director, performer, stylist, and photographer—often triggering the camera with a cable release that, on a few occasions, remains visible in the frame. She worked with 35mm equipment and printed at a scale that echoed 8×10 film "glossies," leaning into the low-budget feel of publicity stills rather than the finish of fine art photography.
Reception quickly framed the series as a touchstone for debates about appropriation, simulacra ("copies without originals"), and the "male gaze," with some readings emphasizing critique and others questioning whether the images also rehearse the structures they expose. Institutional validation followed: in 1995 the Museum of Modern Art acquired the series (then numbering 69 prints), cementing Untitled Film Stills as a key reference point for later photographic practices that treat self-presentation as both performance and analysis.
