Cindy Sherman: Portraits in question

Since her Untitled Film Stills of the 1980s, Cindy Sherman has assumed the roles of artist and model to present a continuum of complex female personas that are embedded within our cultural unconscious. Though we are often reminded that her photographs are not self-portraits, Sherman continues to employ many stylistic conventions of portrait photography. I use this as a means to re-contextualize Sherman's practice within a critical study of portrait photography that will open up new possibilities in reading her work. Using the photographic index, Charles Sanders Peirce's classification of signs, Charcot's nineteenth century photographs of hysterics, and Jacques Lacan's four discourses, I locate Sherman's practice within a complex history of photographic portraiture from the nineteenth century to today's digital landscape to ask where portraiture has been and where it is headed