Photo of the Day: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still #21
The most remarkable thing about Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series is that the images, born of a very particular moment and paying homage to another, still seem to have circumnavigated place and time. They depict a past, albeit an imaginary one, but they were startlingly new when she created them, just before the cresting of postmodernist critiques. Now they’re the least dated works in the Sherman retrospective at MoMA. True, these images are about the hinterland of our own manufacture, the modernist mythology called identity, and in them Sherman is equally as convincing as Della Street, Anna Magnani and Giulietta Masina. But the most subversive thing about them, it may turn out, is that they muddy the question of time as well.
