Cindy Sherman: Photography as a Stage for Identity

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Cindy Sherman has photographed one model, herself, for almost fifty years, yet scholars rarely read her pictures as self-portraits. This comprehensive guide follows her work from the 1977 Untitled Film Stills to her 2026 portraits made with Chanel fabrics. It also sets out the main critical debates, the museum history and the market record, with every claim sourced.

Orange-walled gallery with large color photographs from the 1980s series, Cindy Sherman retrospective, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
The 1980s series on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, October 2020. Photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and took her degree at Buffalo State in 19761. Then she moved to New York in 1977, and that autumn she began the Untitled Film Stills, small black-and-white scenes in which she plays the heroines of films that do not exist2.

Everything since follows from that first move. She is her own model, yet the person who appears is always someone else. The Museum of Modern Art gathered 171 photographs in its 2012 retrospective3, and until 23 December 2026 a London gallery is showing her newest portraits, made with archival Chanel fabrics4. The sections below follow that arc in order, and then they turn to the debates it has provoked.

Cindy Sherman at a glance

Born1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey; raised on Long Island5
TrainingBA, State University College at Buffalo, 19766
BreakthroughUntitled Film Stills, 1977–1980
MethodWorks alone as photographer, model, stylist and makeup artist7
Major retrospectivesMoMA (2012); National Portrait Gallery, London (2019); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2020)8910
HonorsHasselblad Award (1999); Praemium Imperiale; Wolf Prize in Arts (2020)1112
Latest exhibitionHauser & Wirth London, 13 October–23 December 202613

Cindy Sherman and the photograph as performance

Sherman makes photographs in which she plays the characters herself, using simple tools such as a camera, a wig, makeup and an outfit.14 She leaves her works untitled, so viewers build their own narratives. Each frame therefore shows a role, not a confession. Indeed, MoMA’s curators describe her as working alone in the studio as photographer, model, stylist and makeup artist.15

Hence, the label self-portrait misleads. A self-portrait, after all, promises the artist’s likeness. Sherman, instead, borrows poses and expressions that already circulate in cinema, magazines and painting. As a result, viewers recognize the type before they notice the person. In short, her real subject is the stock of images through which a culture pictures people.

From Buffalo to New York: the making of an artist

Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up on Long Island.16 She belongs to the first generation of Americans raised on television, so mass media shaped her imagination early.17 She enrolled at Buffalo State College in 1972, first studied painting, and then turned to photography under the influence of conceptual and performance artists.18 Moreover, she studied film with the avant-garde filmmaker Paul Sharits and made experimental films alongside her photographs.19

Buffalo also gave her a community. The artist-run space Hallwalls opened there in February 1975, and Sherman served for a time as its secretary.20 Then, in 1977 she moved to New York, and in 1978 she became a part-time assistant at Artists Space under its director, Helene Winer.21 Meanwhile, she had already begun the series that would make her famous.

Sherman and the Pictures Generation

The Metropolitan Museum’s 2009 exhibition, curated by Douglas Eklund, placed Sherman among the Pictures Generation. Indeed, this loose group of New York artists worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, mostly through photography, and examined how images shape perception.22 The name comes from a 1977 exhibition called Pictures at Artists Space.23

However, the label has limits. In 2017 Heather Diack and Erina Duganne argued that the group’s use of media culture is central to 1980s art, yet its global context and privileged position need rethinking.24

The Met’s essay on the Pictures Generation links Sherman with Laurie Simmons. It says both worked at the intersection of personal and collective memory, sifting through the disposable products of their youth, from B-movies to dollhouses. More broadly, the essay says the group treated images as material to scavenge and question, not as neutral records25.

Before the Film Stills: Cindy Sherman’s 1976 portraits

The Film Stills were not her first staged pictures. A Metropolitan Museum text about a 2020 exhibition, reproduced by The Art Wolf, says Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned film stills26. We therefore date the start of her role-playing before 1977, but we cannot name the early series from our sources.

Untitled Film Stills: cinema without a film

Sherman began the Untitled Film Stills in fall 1977, at age 23. The series grew to 70 photographs over about three years, and the first prints sold for $50 each.27 Specifically, the photographs imitate publicity stills from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir and European art cinema. Sherman has said she had no specific film in mind, so her characters are generic female types.28 Hauser & Wirth likewise describes invented roles, as if they came from one actress’s career.29

The exact count varies in MoMA’s own documents. Its 1996 acquisition release describes 69 black-and-white photographs, whereas its 2012 retrospective release speaks of 70.3031 Readers will therefore meet both numbers, and both come from the museum.

A system of roles

MoMA acquired the complete series in 1995 and showed it in full from 26 June to 2 September 1997.32 Thus, seen together, the stills read as a system of roles rather than a set of isolated icons. In fact, no still reproduces a real film. The story is missing, so the viewer supplies it. That gap reveals how quickly we accept stock types such as the femme fatale or the girl next door.

The critical debates: what do the Film Stills mean?

Feminist readings: critique or complicity?

For Laura Mulvey, Sherman treats femininity as a constructed performance, so the nostalgia of old cinema exposes its own artifice.33 In addition, Respini notes that Mulvey linked the frames within the frames to the male gaze.34 Jui-Ch’i Liu, however, reads the series against established feminist interpretations and stresses the masquerade and the position of the female spectator.35

More recently, Liang-Ju Chen argues that the photographs deconstruct traditional images of women and show gender identity as something performed.36

Conversely, Michelle Meagher steps back from these readings. She argues that feminist debates over whether Sherman helps or harms feminist politics have shifted attention from the artworks to the artist’s own political identity. Moreover, her essay traces that history from Douglas Crimp’s 1979 championing of Sherman to a 2000 exhibition in New York. Instead of asking what Sherman intends, Meagher asks whether the works themselves are feminist.37

Gallery room in the Berardo Collection museum, Lisbon, showing photographs by women artists including Cindy Sherman
A room of photographs by women artists, including Sherman, in the Berardo Collection museum, Lisbon. Photo: dalbera, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Postmodernism and the simulacrum

Critics also read the stills through postmodernism and psychoanalysis. According to Respini, Craig Owens treated the women as media images of femininity, while Rosalind Krauss, in her 1993 book, connected the work to Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum.38 Similarly, Laetitia Barrière’s 2006 article examines representation, simulacrum and identity in Sherman’s work.39 David Carrier, meanwhile, compares Sherman with Warhol as a self-portraitist in the age of mechanical reproduction.40 For the wider theory, see our essays on Baudrillard and the simulacra of photography and on Rosalind Krauss and photography.

Self-portrait or impersonation? Cindy Sherman’s critics

The label remains contested. Elisabeth Bronfen argues that Sherman’s hysterical performance is a self-portrait, but one distorted by costumes, make-up and props41. Meanwhile, Karantonis reads the self-portraits as cross-genre impersonation that challenges the boundary between visual art and performance42. Therefore, the safest statement is that she is always the model, while the debate concerns whether the person shown is herself.

A skeptical reading

On the other hand, a skeptic may object that the stills are nostalgic rather than critical, because they revive the glamour of old Hollywood. One reply is that fidelity is the point: only a convincing imitation can make the machinery of a cliché visible. A second answer draws on Meagher’s approach: the argument should rest on the images, not on assumptions about what the artist believes.

Color, scale and the 1980s

In 1980, for example, Sherman moved to color and from real locations to her studio. In Rear Screen Projections she posed in front of projected backdrops, a method Hitchcock used, so her figures no longer belonged to a physical place.43

The Centerfolds of 1981

Then the Centerfolds (1981) followed. Ingrid Sischy commissioned these 12 horizontal color photographs for Artforum as parodies of men’s magazine fold-outs, but the magazine did not publish them.4445 According to Hauser & Wirth, it feared a public backlash.46 Metro Pictures then showed the series in November 1981, and it sparked a major debate about victimization and voyeurism, especially around Untitled #93.47

The Met’s entry on Untitled #87 gives another angle. It says the magazine that commissioned the works ultimately rejected them, and that the spot-lit poses often imply vulnerability, trauma and even violence. It adds that some critics felt the pictures did not stand far enough apart from the objectification they depicted48. Consequently, no single motive explains the rejection.

Darker series in the mid-1980s

Next, the work turned darker in the mid-1980s. MoMA’s 2012 retrospective paired the Fairy Tales (1985) with the later Clowns, and grouped the Disasters (1986–89) with the Sex Pictures (1992) in a gallery on the grotesque.49 Indeed, the Sex Pictures used medical dolls.50 Meanwhile, the History Portraits (1988–90) parodied Old Master paintings, and MoMA notes that many of their sitters are male.51

The grotesque, the digital and the aging body

Then, around 2000, the work changed again. The Head Shots (2000–02), sometimes called Hollywood/Hamptons, came first, and the Clowns (2003–04) followed.52 Sherman shot the Clowns on slide film and then added digital backgrounds.53 Her first fully digital series was the Balenciaga fashion pictures of 2007–08, and in 2010 she began making digital photographic murals.54

Furthermore, the Society Portraits (2008) show older women from elite social circles on a large scale.55 For these, Sherman used a digital camera and a green screen, altering the backgrounds much as a painter would.56 A reader may find this later work more grotesque, and less politically legible, than the Film Stills. Yet the discomfort looks deliberate: it widens the question from femininity alone to the conventions of class, age and power.

Cindy Sherman’s film Office Killer

Sherman also directed a feature film. Film Forum lists Office Killer (1997) as a horror quasi-comedy, with Carol Kane as a timid copy editor who, after losing her job, takes a dead coworker’s body home57. We found no museum source on how the film relates to her photographs, so we do not claim a link.

Cindy Sherman on Instagram: new work or private habit?

In August 2017 Sherman made her Instagram account public after running it privately for months. In fact, it held more than 590 images, including filtered self-portraits, everyday photos and, in some posts, a hospital stay.58 However, critics disagreed about its status. Artnet asked whether the posts count as new work, whereas a Hyperallergic column ran under the headline “Why I “Like” but Don’t Love” the photographs.59 The question matters because Sherman’s method, a wig, makeup and a camera, now belongs to everyday phones.

Museums, money and the canon

Overall, institutions have built Sherman’s reputation step by step. MoMA bought the complete Film Stills in 1995 and organized a 171-photograph retrospective in 2012, which toured to SFMOMA, the Walker Art Center and the Dallas Museum of Art.60 In 2019, moreover, the National Portrait Gallery in London showed her from 27 June to 15 September 2019, in an exhibition curated by Paul Moorhouse.61 Finally, in Paris, the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened a retrospective covering 1975 to 2020 and 18 series on 23 September 2020.62

Market value and honors

Gallery hallway at the Wexner Center for the Arts with a Cindy Sherman photograph on the wall at right
A hallway at the Wexner Center for the Arts with a Sherman photograph on the wall at right. Photo: Vince Reinhart, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Meanwhile, the market tells a parallel story. In May 2011 Untitled #96 sold at Christie’s for about $3.89 million, then the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction.63

We did not retrieve later auction records, so that figure is a 2011 benchmark, not a current record. Price, however, is not proof of importance. Instead, it raises a fair question about how museum canonization and market value reinforce each other. Besides, the honors keep accumulating: the Hasselblad Award in 1999, the Praemium Imperiale and, in 2020, the Wolf Prize in Arts.6465

Cindy Sherman, fashion and the 2026 Chanel fabrics

Indeed, fashion has run through Sherman’s work for decades. MoMA’s 2012 retrospective devoted a gallery to her fashion commissions from 1983 to 2011.66 In addition, it would be a mistake to read these pictures as ordinary fashion photography, because the characters often defy the industry’s ideals.

Likewise, her newest work continues that thread. From 13 October to 23 December 2026, Hauser & Wirth London shows nine new photographs from the series Fabric Matrons, all made in 2026.67 Specifically, Sherman built the staged scenes around draped fabrics, and several incorporate Chanel archival pieces, or fabric and jewelry supplied at Chanel’s invitation. This collaboration raises a fair question, because a luxury house supplies material for a critique of how femininity and luxury are staged. Rather than resolve that tension, the pictures put it on view.

Why Cindy Sherman still matters

Sherman’s lasting contribution is methodological. In fact, she showed that a photograph can stage an identity rather than record one, and that the scripts beneath apparently natural identities can be copied, quoted and questioned. Today, for instance, filters and avatars make self-presentation routine. Nevertheless, a skeptic may say that this routine has turned her critique into a commonplace. Overall, the better answer is that influence is not exhaustion: Sherman made the constructed image impossible to ignore.

In short, her work holds three claims in tension. It is feminist without being reducible to a single feminist message, and postmodern without being merely theoretical. It is also commercially successful without being simply complicit with the image industries it examines. Indeed, each claim stays open to dispute, and that openness explains why scholars keep returning to her.

Frequently asked questions about Cindy Sherman

Are the Untitled Film Stills self-portraits?

Sherman is the model in every frame, yet she plays invented female types, not herself. Moreover, the series imitates publicity stills, and she has said she had no specific film in mind.

How many Untitled Film Stills are there?

MoMA’s 1996 acquisition release counts 69, while its 2012 retrospective release counts 70. Both figures come from the museum, so cite the document you rely on.

Where can I see Cindy Sherman’s work?

First, MoMA holds the complete Untitled Film Stills in its collection. In 2026, moreover, Hauser & Wirth London shows the new Fabric Matrons until 23 December.

Did Cindy Sherman make films?

Yes. She directed Office Killer in 1997, a horror quasi-comedy. See the film section above.

Is Untitled #96 still the most expensive photograph?

No source we read says so. It was the highest price ever paid for a photograph in 2011, but we did not retrieve later auction records.

To compare her with another staged picture of the same era, read our study of Picture for Women by Jeff Wall. For more names, browse our guide to famous contemporary photographers and our overview of contemporary fine art photography. Finally, the videos, links and papers below add primary material.

Sources and limits

We did not retrieve several sources, so this article does not cover them. They include later auction records, Christie’s lot pages, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate pages, catalogues and interview transcripts, and the names of Sherman’s earliest series. The Met’s own page on the 1976 series was read only through a secondary reproduction.

Several scholarly papers rest on summaries, and DOI checks confirm only that the papers exist. In addition, we replaced five reproductions of Sherman’s works with openly licensed gallery photographs, because we could not verify licences for the originals. We did not inspect competing guides.

Curated videos about Cindy Sherman

In this video Jörg Colberg presents the book of Cindy Sherman published by Flammarion in 2006 . Find more fascinating photobooks presentations in Colberg’s Vimeo channel https://www.youtube.com/user/jmcolberg/videos and books reviews in his website http://cphmag.com.

The following video, found in ArtsHub Vimeo channel https://www.youtube.com/user/artsHubAustralia, shows a great and short presentation of Cindy Sherman. Find more art related content in ArtsHub website http://www.artshub.com.au/

In the follwing video, produced by MoMa, Cindy Sherman is presented by the Chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Eva Respini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED6QhmRchZI

https://wayback.archive-it.org/4387/20140612185410/http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/

https://www.moma.org/multimedia/video/200/1064

Curated Links about Cindy Sherman

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/840/

Glenn D. Lowry, My Favourite Cindy Sherman, MoMA. (source)

https://hyperallergic.com/394486/cindy-sherman-joins-instagram

Curated Papers about Cindy Sherman

Holtzman Dinah, Portrait of the postmodern artist as hysteric, 2014 (Thesis).

Simmons, William J., Portfolio: Cindy Sherman, New Work, King Kong Magazine, 2016. (source)

Gerrie Vanessa, Exhibition Review: Cindy Sherman, City Gallery Wellington, 2016. (source)

Maura Reilly, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills Series: Regressive or Transgressive Mimicry? Women Making Art: Women Artists from the Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts, 1960‐1990. Eds. Deborah Johnson and Wendy Oliver(Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 117–140. (source)

Cloutier-Blazzard Kimberlee A., Cindy Sherman: Her “History Portrait” Series as Post-Modern Parody, 2007. (source)

Mauer Barry J., The Epistemology of Cindy Sherman: A Research Method for Media and Cultural Studies, 2005. (source)

Hopson Charlotte, Tormented Torsos, the Pornographic Imagination, and Articulated Minors: The Works of Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman. (source)

Rubinstein Daniel, Techniques of The Self; On the art of Cindy Sherman from Untitled Film Stills to Instagram, 2018. (source)

Interviews with Cindy Sherman

The Walker, November 2012.

Apollo Magazine, June 2019.

The Guardian, June 2019.

Tate, March 2019.

Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2020.

  1. Art21 profile of the artist (profile)
  2. Respini, curator of the MoMA retrospective (essay)
  3. MoMA press release for the 2012 retrospective (press release)
  4. Hauser & Wirth, London exhibition page (exhibition page)
  5. Eva Respini, curator of the MoMA retrospective, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (essay hosted by MoMA, 2012). Biographical details in this section come from it.
  6. Art21 Magazine, Meet the Season 5 Artist: Cindy Sherman (27 August 2009): birth in 1954, BA from the State University College at Buffalo in 1976, and her working materials.
  7. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  8. MoMA, press release for the 2012 retrospective (26 February–11 June 2012; 171 photographs; organized by Eva Respini with Lucy Gallun).
  9. The Art Newspaper, Cindy Sherman gets first UK retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery (20 June 2019): 27 June–15 September 2019, curated by Paul Moorhouse.
  10. LVMH, press article on the Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective: 1975 to 2020, 18 series, opening on 23 September 2020 after a postponement from April.
  11. Hasselblad Foundation, laureate page (1999 award; ceremony in March 2000). Praemium Imperiale, laureate page, painting category.
  12. Metro Pictures, artist biography: the Pictures Generation, Documenta 1983, the 2013 Venice Biennale, the 2019 National Portrait Gallery show and the 2020 Wolf Prize in Arts.
  13. Hauser & Wirth London, exhibition page (13 October–23 December 2026): Fabric Matrons, Untitled #701–#710 (no #707), all 2026.
  14. Art21 Magazine, Meet the Season 5 Artist: Cindy Sherman (27 August 2009): birth in 1954, BA from the State University College at Buffalo in 1976, and her working materials.
  15. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  16. Eva Respini, curator of the MoMA retrospective, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (essay hosted by MoMA, 2012). Biographical details in this section come from it.
  17. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  18. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  19. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  20. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  21. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  22. Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release for The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (21 April–2 August 2009; curator Douglas Eklund).
  23. Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release for The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (21 April–2 August 2009; curator Douglas Eklund).
  24. Heather Diack and Erina Duganne, “Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography,” photographies 10, no. 3 (2017): 235–243, doi:10.1080/17540763.2017.1340734.
  25. Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Pictures Generation”. (The Met)
  26. The Art Wolf, “Photography’s Last Century” at the Met, 2020, quoting the museum’s press material. This is a secondary reproduction, and the text does not name the series. (The Art Wolf)
  27. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  28. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  29. Hauser & Wirth, exhibition page for the 1977–1982 works (Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections, Centerfolds).
  30. MoMA, press release of 18 January 1996 on the acquisition of the complete Untitled Film Stills: 69 black-and-white photographs, 1977–1980.
  31. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  32. MoMA, The Complete Untitled Film Stills, exhibition page (26 June–2 September 1997): 69 photographs, acquired by the museum in 1995.
  33. Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,” New Left Review I/188 (July–August 1991), PDF.
  34. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  35. Jui-Ch’i Liu, “Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills,” History of Photography 34, no. 1 (2010): 79–89, doi:10.1080/03087290903361399.
  36. Liang-Ju Chen, “The Female Identity Being Performed: Gender Rebellion in Cindy Sherman’s Photography,” SHS Web of Conferences 174 (2023): 02015, doi:10.1051/shsconf/202317402015.
  37. Michelle Meagher, “Would the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up? Encounters between Cindy Sherman and Feminist Art Theory,” Women: A Cultural Review 13, no. 1 (2002): 18–36, doi:10.1080/09574040210122968.
  38. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  39. Laetitia Barrière, “Représentation, simulacre et identité dans l’œuvre de Cindy Sherman,” Transatlantica 2 (2006), doi:10.4000/transatlantica.1169.
  40. David Carrier, “Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman: The Self-Portrait in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 18, no. 1 (1998): 36–40, doi:10.1086/sou.18.1.23205034.
  41. Bronfen, E. (2021). The other self of the imagination: Cindy Sherman’s hysterical performance. In Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, 179–202. DOI verified in Crossref; we read a summary only. (DOI)
  42. Karantonis, P. (2008). Staged photography and the performance of autofacture: Cross-genre impersonation in Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits. International Journal of the Arts in Society, 3(2), 37–44. DOI verified in Crossref; we read a summary only. (DOI)
  43. Hauser & Wirth, exhibition page for the 1977–1982 works (Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections, Centerfolds).
  44. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  45. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  46. Hauser & Wirth, exhibition page for the 1977–1982 works (Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections, Centerfolds).
  47. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  48. Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection entry for Untitled #87 (1981). The entry does not name the magazine. (The Met)
  49. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  50. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  51. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  52. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  53. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  54. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” (MoMA, 2012).
  55. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  56. Art21 Magazine, Meet the Season 5 Artist: Cindy Sherman (27 August 2009): birth in 1954, BA from the State University College at Buffalo in 1976, and her working materials.
  57. Film Forum, listing for Office Killer. (Film Forum)
  58. Dazed, Cindy Sherman’s Instagram is now public (4 August 2017); Artnet, report on the account (first post captioned “Selfie! No filter, hahaha”).
  59. Hyperallergic, “Why I “Like” but Don’t Love Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Photos” (headline only; the column itself was not reviewed for this article).
  60. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  61. The Art Newspaper, Cindy Sherman gets first UK retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery (20 June 2019): 27 June–15 September 2019, curated by Paul Moorhouse.
  62. LVMH, press article on the Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective: 1975 to 2020, 18 series, opening on 23 September 2020 after a postponement from April.
  63. Popular Photography, report on the Christie’s sale of Untitled #96 (May 2011): about $3.89 million, above the $3.35 million paid for Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon. That article dates the earlier sale to 2006, but a 2008 report places it on 7 February 2007 at Sotheby’s London (£1.7 million), and I follow the later date.
  64. Hasselblad Foundation, laureate page (1999 award; ceremony in March 2000). Praemium Imperiale, laureate page, painting category.
  65. Metro Pictures, artist biography: the Pictures Generation, Documenta 1983, the 2013 Venice Biennale, the 2019 National Portrait Gallery show and the 2020 Wolf Prize in Arts.
  66. MoMA, 2012 retrospective press release.
  67. Hauser & Wirth London, exhibition page (13 October–23 December 2026): Fabric Matrons, Untitled #701–#710 (no #707), all 2026.

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