- Cindy Sherman prefers to use self-portraits to send messages about current issues, showing herself portraying different characters and personas. In this way, Sherman could also be classified as an actress along with a photographer. She has portrayed roles as a prostitute, women in varying intense emotional states, an abused housewife, and a dancer.
- She prefers photographing grotesque characters and posing, involving disasters and/or sex in her 1980s-90s series. In her words, 1986, “I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful; I’m much more fascinated with the other side.”
- When she had just graduated college, she started her 1976-2000 series Bus Riders, where she dressed up as various people she encountered while riding buses. One of her tactics for impersonation included donning blackface. These garnered divisive reviews by critics, some saying it exposed the racism embedded in society while others called it insensitive.
Story idea: I think I would like to have a story centered around a single day in her life as she goes around and finds the ‘grotesque’ in objects, people, and situations. I would also like to have it set in the 80s; reason being she took a lot of inspiration from the AIDS crisis and I want to explore how exactly she did that, whether she actually visited hospitals or relied on what was available through the media, as well as the reactions of AIDS patients who knew of her work and whether they liked it or found it mocking.