Cindy Sherman had her breakthrough in 1980, when she exhibited her first 'Untitled Film Stills' at The Kitchen gallery in New York. This was the start of an international career that has taken her to the very top. Sherman's work has received widespread attention and she has an established place in contemporary art history. It was in her twenties that Sherman began her artistic project, 'Untitled Film Stills', which would forever change and shift concepts and ideas in film, feminism and art theory. Using herself as a model, she staged 69 black and white images. By imitating the clichés of female film roles, the series turns concepts inside out. They clearly show the gender stereotypes that are eternally repeated in our popular culture, such as the career woman, the sex bomb, the housewife, the student and others. The series was the beginning of Sherman's long and ongoing artistic project.
In the 1970s and beyond, discussions about photography as a documentary medium became an important part of many artists' work. They moved away from the idea that photography should reflect reality and became interested in how the camera could be used to construct new identities. Sherman is one of the artists who has taken this discussion to its logical conclusion, with series after series of photographs of herself in different identities and situations. However, her photographs are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. The works evoke stories without revealing anything in themselves; the titles give no clues, the story is in the eye of the beholder. The works refer to images from film, art and media, creating links between the familiar and the unfamiliar. They often bring to mind the paparazzi images of celebrities that fill the tabloids. Turning the camera on herself was in itself groundbreaking at the time. It was a new way of working with the camera and using the technique conceptually to express an artistic idea. In the late seventies, photography had not yet reached the same status as traditional art forms. The art world was dominated by painting, pop art and neo-expressionism. Some artists went a different way and started experimenting with other techniques such as photography, film, performance and text. Together with Sherrie Levine, Laurie Simmons, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, among others, Cindy Sherman brought photography to the forefront of art. This meant a revaluation of photography, which now had a collector's value as art. Cindy Sherman's first work was purchased for MoMa in 1982, when she was 28 years old. In the same year she was included in both the Venice Biennale and Documenta 7, the attention was enormous and the international breakthrough was a fact. In 2012 she was honored with a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 2013 the exhibition "Untitled Horrors" was shown at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.