The allegorical nature of Cindy Sherman's film stills

In response to one of the posts below I would like to comment, if only briefly, on the allegorical nature of Cindy Sherman’s Film stills in light of Craig Owen’s essay, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.

Cindy Sherman created an allegorical cast of women that seem to play-out classic movie roles in her photographs. By restaging the roles portrayed by women in the latently misogynistic mass media, using only herself as a model, she confronted the psychopathological structures of the role of photography as a way of representing the 'true image' of our culture. Her photos can be seen to be both metaphorical and metonymical in the sense that the original characters from the film stills have been supplanted by Sherman herself, a decision that alludes to a deeper significance than that of pure aesthetics.

From Fosters essay, Test subjects we learn that Warhol highlighted the constructed nature of the personas, exemplified in his paintings, by using “ brash colors and thick lines often off-register” that, “appear as blatant make-up, even extreme make-over—a cosmetic construction of disparate parts.” The constructed nature of the image and the artificial “make up” of the subjects invite the viewer to deconstruct the persona portrayed.

Sherman clearly shared Warhol’s intrigue in the camera’s capacity to deconstruct the persona in front of the camera. Inspired by Duchamp and Warhol's prescient use of the readymade photographic image Sherman appropriated the old cinema stills so that they might later be deconstructed. As both the voyeur and exhibitionist, Sherman invites a level of introspection as she shifts the viewer’s attention to the politics of representation; indeed, one expression has been added to another. But as Owen outlines, “the allegorical supplement is not only an addition, but also a replacement. It takes the place of an earlier meaning, which is thereby either effaced or obscured.” The misogynistic portrayal of women that was so prevalent in the original images, appropriated by Sherman, is here effaced in favor of Sherman’s own articulations.