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Published by Phaidon Press in 2014, Cindy Sherman: Phaidon Focus places Sherman’s work within a sustained inquiry into portraiture, contemporary identity, and the unstable nature of representation. Paul Moorhouse, then Curator of Twentieth Century Portraits at London’s National Portrait Gallery, considers how her photographs make identity appear constructed rather than fixed, and how familiar visual conventions shape the way a person is read.

The book follows Sherman’s life and career chronologically, while one-page “Focus” essays pause over particular bodies of work. This structure gives individual series room to register without losing the longer arc of the practice. Moorhouse moves from the 1970s Untitled Film Stills through the color photographs of the 1980s Centerfolds and onward to the large-scale photographic murals of Sherman’s later career.

That progression is central to the volume’s value. Rather than treating Sherman’s images as isolated acts of disguise or theatrical invention, the survey situates changes in format, scale, and photographic language within a continuing examination of representation. The selected series show an artist repeatedly returning to the codes through which femininity, character, and social identity are pictured, while altering the visual terms of that inquiry.

At 144 pages, the hardback is deliberately concentrated: a chronological account supplemented by close readings rather than an exhaustive catalogue. For a serious photography collection, its significance lies in the clarity of that editorial framework. It provides a compact map of several defining series and a curator’s interpretation of the questions connecting them—useful both as an introduction to Sherman and as a concise reference alongside more specialized monographs and exhibition catalogues.