Cindy Sherman: I’ve never wanted to like hammer a message over somebody’s head like, this is how you’re supposed to, you know, picture what I’m trying to say. I kind of like that there is an ambiguity about what’s going on in the image. And that people can have completely different concepts of what they think is going on. And it’s not always, you know, something that I’m happy about, like, you know, like some of the early stuff I did from this series called The Centerfolds were considered too close to being, like, kind of titillating images that one might find in, like, a true detective magazine from those days. And I could see the point, but I also felt like if I, because somebody at one point back then was saying, “You should have like a, you know, label next to the image explaining so people understand you’re not trying to propagate this, you know, sexist imagery. You’re, you know, trying to criticize it.” And I just felt like I, you know, if I have to tell people, you know, what it’s about then, you know, like I’m — Well, what it really did is it made me, encouraged me to try to figure out the next series that I’m doing to try to make it seem a little more obvious what I’m trying to say and not seem egregious or something like that.
Usually the series, because I always shoot in series, so maybe anywhere from 10 to 20 or 30 images, and then I usually take a break because I feel like I’ve gone through the whole range of what I wanted to say within that series, and usually there is something that connects one, like, or as a trajectory from one to the next, and often it’s something that I feel like I didn’t say quite clearly enough in the previous series. So maybe I need to, you know, tweak it this way. But also sometimes it’s just been, like sometimes I’ve done very kind of difficult series that people wouldn’t necessarily want to buy and put on their walls and in a way it was kind of intentional, and that was one of the things I started doing in the 80s when there was a lot of hype within the art world and when I was starting to get some attention, but I didn’t want to feel like just the art world’s flavor of the month. So, I intentionally did a series that I knew was going to be really difficult, that people wouldn’t necessarily want to put over their couch or, you know, over their bed or something. And that’s when — they were called The Disaster Series, kind of loosely called that. And I’ve found that every time I’ve done a series like that, that’s really challenging for me, and I know it’s going to be challenging for viewers sometimes, I then feel like I want to play the next, you know, the next thing I do, I want to just have fun and that’s right after that I did the kind of History Portraits and that was fun. It was just like kind of, it seemed almost kind of easy, maybe too easy to mimic these classical paintings. And then after that, I did the Sex Pictures, which were also disturbing and, you know, difficult for people to want to buy. And I feel like I’ve done that many times, like doing something really fun and then kind of feeling guilty about it, I suppose, because it’s too much fun and maybe it became too popular. And so, then I do this really difficult series, but I think I really enjoy the difficult parts more than, even though the makeup and, you know, vamping is kind of fun, it’s also really fun when I can really challenge myself to do something that’s very difficult.