[Cindy Sherman's "untitled studies for film stills"] treat the subject of mimesis, not simply as an aesthetic activity, but as it functions in relation to the constitution of the self. Sherman's works are all self-portraits, but in them the artist invariably appears masked, disguised: she first costumes herself to resemble familiar female stereotypes -- career girl, ingenue, sex object... -- and then photographs herself in poses and settings reminiscent of the cinematic culture of the 1950s and 60s. Her "characters" requently glance anxiously outside the frame at some unspecified menace, thereby implying the presence of a narrative even while withholding it. This -- the "still" -- effect prevents us from mistaking Sherman's women for particular human subjects caught up in narrative webs of romance or intrigue (a reading which would correspond to Barthes's first, or literal level, which indicates the position of the image in the anecdote). Instead, it compels a typological reading: Sherman's women are not women but images of women, specular models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation, identification; they are, in other words, tropes, figures.
Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part 2" (1980)
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