Cindy Sherman: They were OK with it as long as I went to, like, a college where I could learn to, I could get, like, a teaching degree so that I could fall back on that. And so, that was one of the reasons I chose Buffalo State. But luckily, I fell in, my first year or my second year, with some friends who were my age and a little bit older, who lived and worked in this part of Buffalo and wanted to start up an alternative gallery. And it was really through knowing that group that I became more exposed to contemporary art, and going to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which was across the street from the school, and that was really my education in art, this group of friends, not so much the college, I have to say, but the friends.
Q: Can it possibly be true that you failed photography?
The reason I couldn’t quite grasp it was because of all of the technical things, of you know, making the perfect black and white print. And I suppose I didn’t really care about that so much, the technical part of it. And then my teacher, when I was retaking the course, was turning me on to conceptual art and minimalist art, and this idea that the idea can be really the art and not so much the—the byproduct would be something that you might put on a wall or show on a video camera, but that you could put more thought into the idea of it. And up until that moment, I had been painting, and then I was kind of majoring in painting at that point, but I was doing very exacting replicas of things, you know, I was copying things, you know, like, photographically. And when I started using a camera, I realized, well, yeah, I can just capture the image in a, you know, split of a second and put much more thought into what I’m going to do with this image or what makes the image, and so that kind of made a lot more sense than this laborious process of painting something so realistically.