Weekly Selfie 2 : Cindy Sherman - Riya Bhajan

 

Original - Cindy Sherman's Librarian

 “A number of younger artists are very much indebted to Sherman in their exploration of not just identity but also the nature of representation. Now we all take it for granted that a photograph can be Photoshopped. We live in the era of YouTube fame and reality-TV shows and makeovers, where you can be anything you want to be any minute of the day, and artists are responding to that. Cindy was one of the first to explore the idea of the malleability or fluidity of identity.” (Eva Respini)

I chose this quote because this is initially what inspired my weekly selfie. The action of photoshop and editing the way you look can easily be achieved and look real. Influencers, models, and celebrities promote an unachievable beauty standard by making their photoshopped pictures look so realistic, so realistic it looks natural and undetectable. With Photoshop it's so easy to transform your appearance but Cindy Sherman artistic achieved transformation without photoshop for more creative reasons.

"Sherman refuses to take any credit for her innovations. What has she herself discovered through her work? “I think it has made me realize that we’ve all chosen who we are in terms of how we want the world to see us,” she says."

In the concept of transformation, we all can alter how we look, become who we want to be and people would always perceive us differently. Cindy Sherman depicts the many ways to transform your appearance and pick up a different persona.

Weekly Selfie

I was inspired by Cindy Sherman to transform my appearance in this week's assignment. I recreated one of her film stills, where she is in a library, wearing a long blonde wig as she mysteriously looks back. Instead of using a wig, I used an app called FaceApp to make my dark hair blonde and I was able to give myself bangs with a feature on this app. FaceApp went viral for effortless and realistic being able to alter one's appearance, you can do anything to subtlety or drastically change your appearance, from makeup to hair. Photoshop negatively affects everyone, the viewers or unimpressionable young girls are constantly comparing themselves to influencers and celebrities wishing they can look like unrealistic people. The person photoshopping themselves is also being affected, they may have body dysmorphia. This means they are constantly trying to alter the way they want to look but when they look in the mirror or look at un-photoshopped pictures of themselves they are not the same person, they hate how they actually look. This is a self-portrait mainly representing the ways I can alter myself to become someone who I may want to be, but it is not detectable by someone who has never seen me before because of modern-day photoshop.