Fairy Tale example essay topic

Artist: Cindy Sherman Born: 1954 Glen Ridge, NJ and raised in suburban Long Island School: Earned a BA Degree in 1976, Buffalo State University of N.Y., where she initially studied painting. She failed the requisite introductory photography course because of her difficulties with the technological aspects of making a print. She credits her next photography teacher with introducing her to conceptual art, which she says had a liberating effect on her. Graduated in 1977 and moved to N.Y. Exhibit: First survey exhibition of her work, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1982 followed by a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. 1987 The complete series (Film Stills) was first exhibited at the Hirsh horn Museum in Washington D.C., 1995 Lives and works in N.Y. Film Stills: Series of black and white photographs created from 1977 to 1980, series of 69, includes 7 color works ranging in date from 1980 to 1992 Many taken in Sherman's apartment, she plays every role herself, although they are not self-portraits. She does not reveal herself, but shows the many masks of femininity. She says she is trying to make people recognize something.

Sherman impersonates various female character types from old B movies and film Noir spoke to a generation of baby boomers women who had grown up absorbing those glamorous images at home on their televisions, taking such portrayals as cues for the future. She used photography to challenge the images and myths of popular culture and mass media. Her images explore the relationship between posing and the self. Images show her in 50's garb as housewife, glamour girl, etc. and explore the various stereotypes of women. She is known as cynical, repulsive, and shocking. She says on the film noir vixen character, 'To pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality-growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl.

' Fairy Tale: Even before completing the black and white series, Sherman began to make color photographs, whose motifs soon broadened beyond the world of film. In a successive series of pictures since 1983, the goulash and grotesque imagery of fairy tales. Sherman finds a new, more dangerous, and belligerent retrospect of fairy tales. She has been horrifying audiences for over two decades with her gory, explicit re-telling of fairy tales. Her images, mostly untitled, record the dark underbelly of the stories and media imagery whose placid happiness and 'happily ever after' endings we take for granted.

In Sherman's fairy tale series from 1985, she puts a surreal twist on the pleasantries of Mother Goose and more appropriately, the bleak, often violent stories from Brother's Grimm. Disney would not approve. The fairy tales play on artifice and humor to create magical mirrors of metaphors.