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Cindy Sherman | $46.55 | Buy on Amazon |
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Cindy Sherman | $45.00 | Buy on Amazon |
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Cindy Sherman: Centerfold (Untitled #96): MoMA One on One Series | $13.93 | Buy on Amazon |
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Cindy Sherman: Retrospective | $12.88 | Buy on Amazon |
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Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion (Dutch Edition) | $53.58 | Buy on Amazon |
Cindy Sherman’s Head Shots is a series of staged character photographs made around 2000–02. Its portraits borrow the familiar look of identification photos, aspiring actors’ promotional pictures and department-store studio portraits—but use that plain format to show how identity, beauty and aspiration can be performed through appearance.
What are Cindy Sherman’s Head Shots?
The series is also identified as Head Shots (Hollywood/Hampton Types). Rather than documenting real people in an ordinary portrait session, Sherman constructs characters through costume, makeup, prosthetics and photographic staging. The faces may initially seem recognizable as social types, but the images are carefully made performances.
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The Walker Art Center describes the works as more intimately scaled than some of Sherman’s other photographs and links their format to actors’ promotional portraits and department-store studio photography. Those familiar conventions matter: a headshot is supposed to make a person legible and appealing at a glance. Sherman turns that expectation into a subject.
How do the portraits create their effect?
A deliberately ordinary setting
Sammlung Goetz’s record for Untitled #352 describes a banal portrait structure, without interior design or props. The relative plainness of the setting directs attention to the person presented: her expression, styling and carefully composed appearance. The picture looks like a recognizable kind of portrait, even as its subject is unmistakably constructed.
Rank #2
Visible artifice and performed identity
Sherman’s larger practice involves remaking her image to channel and challenge cultural archetypes. QAGOMA notes that in the 2016 GOMA exhibition she served as model, costume designer, makeup artist and photographer. Google Arts & Culture observes that the Head Shots images reveal prosthetics such as noses, eyebrows and breasts. These details can unsettle the impression of naturalism: the viewer sees both a character and clues to how that character has been assembled.
What might the characters suggest?
Sammlung Goetz interprets the exaggerated appearances of the women in the series in relation to wishes for youth and beauty, glamour and success, alongside disappointed ambitions and expectations. That is an institutional reading of the works, not a definitive explanation of every character. The images leave room for viewers to notice how a portrait’s styling can suggest a desired identity—and how that promise may look strained, theatrical or uncertain.
This tension is central to the series’ use of portrait conventions. Promotional and vanity photographs present appearance as a means of becoming more desirable or successful. Sherman’s staging makes that social promise visible without reducing the characters to a single story.
One documented example: Untitled #352
Sammlung Goetz catalogs Untitled #352 as a 2000 C-print measuring 68.6 × 45.7 cm, and identifies it as part of Head Shots (Hollywood/Hampton Types). Those specifications describe this individual work, not every photograph in the series. Its plain portrait structure offers a useful example of how Sherman can make a familiar format feel both specific and artificial.
Rank #4
Where Head Shots fits in Sherman’s practice
Google Arts & Culture notes that Sherman returned to using herself as a model in Head Shots after nearly a decade of still-life work with dolls and props. The series also appeared within a broader view of her practice at GOMA in 2016, alongside works including Clowns, Society Portraits, Murals and fashion-house collaborations.
That exhibition ran in Brisbane from 28 May to 3 October 2016. Its announcement described more than 50 large-scale works; QAGOMA’s opening report counted 56 large-scale photographs and also noted a five-metre-tall mural. These are counts for that historical exhibition, not for the Head Shots series. The juxtaposition placed the more intimate headshots in conversation with later, larger and more elaborate forms of Sherman’s staged photography.
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How to look at a Head Shots portrait
- Start with the format: Ask what the image seems to promise as an ID, promotional or vanity portrait.
- Notice the setting: A spare background can make appearance and expression carry the picture’s meaning.
- Look for construction: Makeup, costume and prosthetics can expose the labor behind a seemingly familiar face.
- Consider the aspiration: Ask what age, beauty, glamour, professional success or social standing the character appears to project, while leaving room for ambiguity.
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