I was just so lucky to spend a couple of days in New York the other day. I have visited the city quite a bit over the years so there’s no longer the “obligation” to do all the tourist attractions and other must sees. It was a very relaxed visit this time with plenty of just walking around. With no particular place to go. Still I could easily fill a number of blog pages here with what I have been doing in this very exciting and beautiful city, but since this is not the place to do such a thing, I’ll focus more on photography.
As it happened, there was a Cindy Sherman exhibition taking place at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which was very conveniently located only a couple of blocks away from the hotel. In preparing the trip to NY I came across the exhibition so I was aware of it, but decided to make an actual visit depend on the weather. During the weekend this was perfect: sunny with temperatures in the high 70’s. On Monday, however, it was raining a bit. Not much, but enough to justify the visit to MoMA. Believe it or not, but at 10am there was already a queue of people who wanted to get in – as you can tell from the picture on the left. Some of them were wearing hoodies to protect them from the drizzling rain.
To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the work of Cindy Sherman. So I Googled around a bit. More than enough to be found on the Internet. I’m not going to repeat here what is already publicly available and pretend I’m some sort of expert. Because I’m not.
In general I didn’t find the work of Cindy Sherman easily accessible. That is, I found it difficult to interprete the pictures individually (one by one). Why did she take the picture the way it was taken? What is she trying to communicate with it? What does the picture tell me? These kind of questions – as I was recently taught in the class Criticizing Photographs – I found hard to answer. Now Cindy Sherman works in series and that’s the way you should read them, and not one by one seperately. And then they started to make more sense to me. That was also the way the exhibition was setup. It showed the various styles and phases throughout Cindy Sherman’s lifecycle. So gradually the appreciation grew during the exhibition.
Just a day or so before I left for NY, I came across Cindy Sherman’s name on one of the photo blogs I read now and then. It had a link to a Wikipedia page called List of most expensive photographs. From the list of 19 photographs 2 came from Cindy Sherman. They were sold for $3,890,500 (number 2 of the list) and $2,700,000 (number 6) respectively. Truely amazing amounts of money.
More on Cindy Sherman and her work can be found here and here. The following text clearly describes her motives and what she’s trying to say with her work:
“By turning the camera on herself, Cindy Sherman has built a name as one of the most respected photographers of the late twentieth century. Although, the majority of her photographs are pictures of her, however, these photographs are most definitely not self-portraits. Rather, Sherman uses herself as a vehicle for commentary on a variety of issues of the modern world: the role of the woman, the role of the artist and many more. It is through these ambiguous and eclectic photographs that Sherman has developed a distinct signature style. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.”
Not being familiar with her work, I found it not always very accessible at the beginning, but developed a better understanding along the way. In retrospect, I was glad to have seen it. It was most certainly well worth the money.