Homework #3

Cindy Sherman is better known as a photographer for her conceptual portraits, in which she is the model and also the director for the setting.  She created her work “clowns” between years 2003 and 2004.  The role her body has in her works is that she is her own model.  Cindy Sherman comes up with the concepts for the portraits and puts on the necessary clothes, makeup, and expressions for the photograph.  For the concept in “Clowns,” Cindy Sherman wanted to use the idea that clowns express more than just their painted faces.  The pictures depict clowns with contorted happy, almost psychotic expressions.  After going through some of her own struggles, after 9/11, she was trying to figure out what she wanted to say to the public.  She wanted to depict how the clowns have sadness beneath the happiness and humor they try to evoke for the audience.  After dressing up the people and painting their faces like clowns, Cindy Sherman photographs them and uses a swirly and obtrusively bright backdrop.  Her “Clowns” portraits are at the MOMA and are different in the other portraits in the message she wants to send, that “clowns are sad, but they are also hysterically, psychotically happy” (Cindy Sherman).