Beyond The Frame

With a major retrospective of Cindy Sherman’s work underway, Frances Hedges talks to the shape-shifting artist about the playful and provocative characters she creates, and how she continues to make art in an age of artifice

Poised at the threshold of her top-floor apartment in New York’s SoHo district, I find myself wondering which of the many versions of Cindy Sherman I am about to meet. From young ingenue to ageing diva, working girl to bored housewife, Renaissance noblewoman to 21st-century street-style star, the photographer has inhabited almost every possible female archetype during a career that has spanned more than 40 years. So it comes as something of a surprise when the woman who opens the door to me turns out to be polite, softly spoken, bare-faced and understated — the polar opposite of the heavily made-up, flamboyantly costumed, larger-than-life characters she portrays in her work.

Sherman, who at 65 is the subject of a major new retrospective at the British National Portrait Gallery in London, has always been clear about the performative nature of her images, none of which she sees as self-portraits. “I really don’t think of myself as being in any of the photographs,” she tells me today as we sit down together at the large, cluttered table in the centre of her light-filled studio. Evidence of her theatricality is all around us, visible in the masks, wigs, props and other ephemera that are lined up on the bookshelves or piled in corners of the room. “Some of these are from the last body of work I was doing, but there are other things I’ve probably had up for 20 years or so,” she says, gesturing towards the magazine tearsheets tacked on the walls. There are voodoo sculptures, a plastic James Bond figure, a set of painted busts (“I was collecting heads for a while”) and some crowns she recently picked up in a Parisian flea market. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,” she admits. “Who knows — maybe I’ll do a series of queens …”