Untitled #92

"Untitled #92" is a 1981 chromogenic print by Cindy Sherman that serves as a companion to the other works in the "Untitled Film Still" series, the image showing the artist in a different costume, pose, and emotional register that demonstrates the extraordinary range of her self-transformative practice. The composition is another 24 × 48 inch print, the horizontal format suggesting the widescreen cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, the image cropped and composed to mimic the narrative conventions of film while refusing to provide the narrative content that would make the image coherent. The chromogenic print creates the same surface of commercial perfection that characterizes the series, the colors saturated and the tones smooth, the technical excellence serving both to seduce the viewer into the cinematic illusion and to maintain the critical distance that allows the deconstruction to occur. The 1981 date places this work in the same period as "Untitled #86" and the other film stills, suggesting that Sherman was producing these images in rapid succession, each photograph exploring a different aspect of the feminine stereotype and its representational construction. Art historians have compared this series to the star portraits of Hollywood photographers like George Hurrell and the fashion photography of the postwar period, noting that Sherman's treatment is more critical, more focused on the artificiality and the pathos of the constructed image than the celebration or the irony of these other traditions.

This 1981 companion chromogenic print expanded self-transformative range through different costume-emotion widescreen cinematic mimicry, using horizontal commercial perfection to both seduce into illusion and maintain critical feminine-stereotype deconstruction distance.

It matters because Sherman put on another face and made the photograph wonder who was really looking—proving that even a mask could be a mirror if the print was sharp enough.