Rarity 2.4/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 75.14/100 · Listings: 11 · Avg price: $260.44 · Min price: $102.63

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Cindy Sherman: Retrospective surveys a practice built on the unstable relationship between appearance and identity. Bringing together more than 200 images, the book follows Sherman from the Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s through the Centerfolds, Fashion, Disasters, Fairy Tales, and History Portraits, as well as photographs shaped by her engagement with Surrealism. Its scope allows recurring devices—costume, pose, setting, artifice—to register not as a fixed signature but as instruments repeatedly adapted to different representational systems.

Sherman’s constructed figures imitate familiar cultural types while exposing the conventions behind them. Femininity and the body emerge here as images made through cinema, fashion, art history, and other visual codes rather than as transparent expressions of an essential self. The movement between recognizable stereotype and deliberate estrangement gives the work its critical force, placing questions associated with feminism and postmodernism inside photographs that remain theatrical, comic, grotesque, and disquieting.

The retrospective is more than a sequence of finished pictures. Excerpts from Sherman’s notebooks, selections from contact sheets, and Polaroid studies disclose aspects of her working process: the testing of roles, gestures, framing, and transformation before a final image takes form. Essays by Cruz, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and Amelia Jones approach the work from distinct positions, connecting these visual constructions to broader debates about contemporary art and the structures of selfhood.

Published by Thames & Hudson in this 220-page paperback form in 2000, the volume offers collectors a substantial account of the range and internal development of Sherman’s work. Its value as a reference lies in the conjunction of major series, preparatory material, and sustained interpretation. Seen together, these elements clarify how one artist’s repeated use of her own body became an inquiry into authorship, spectatorship, and the cultural manufacture of identity.