Art by Cindy Sherman

Sherman has spent her entire career photographing herself, but almost none of the resulting pictures read as self-portraits in any conventional sense. Her breakthrough series, Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), staged her as an invented cast of women lifted from imaginary mid-century movies, each image built from costume, wig, makeup, and set dressing she assembled entirely alone, with no other crew. Later series pushed further into the grotesque, using prosthetics and heavy makeup to construct disturbing, almost unrecognizable figures, turning her own image into raw material for questions about identity, media, and how photographs construct rather than simply record a person.