I find it interesting that Cindy Sherman noticing through social and cultural knowledge, still images can say so much. There are many stereotypes and assumptions in regard to image especially clothing. We’ve all grown up being taught that particular wardrobe can tell you a lot about a person. A woman wearing a white gown holding flowers can be assumed to be a bride, a man with an eye-patch and peg leg is a pirate. Culturally we have all attached ourselves to collective representations of ‘image’ through clothing. Sherman looks into femininity and how at the surface of the pictures, an interior mix of emotions is characterized. There is a catalog of possibilities for the photographs, Williamson puts it best with “Her expression is an index of something and someone else, something we don’t know about but which everything in the frame points to.” I feel I can relate to her insight in the performance I did, for I made sure the images were indexical enough to send a concise message. The paradigm between vulnerability and eroticism were common themes even without having Sherman in lewd sexual poses. None of the images I encountered jumped out at me [as a male] as overtly sexual. Her experiences in B-movies, foreign films, and film noir transferred over into her photography. Many of the women characters in these films are depicted to be distressful, passive, and victimized. This plays into the notion of social and cultural opinion on women and their images in film, television, and magazines. Sherman played into these ideals and projected a false-reality in her photographs, respectively named ‘Film Stills.’ We know that these pictures were staged and the frame was predetermined, and that Sherman knowingly dressed the way she did to make a statement. There are stories told in the images, some more complete than others; because of that I feel it’s up to the audience to put themselves in Sherman’s persona. She clearly takes into consideration the entire frame of shot and make sure it is authentic even down to the blouse buttons. “Sherman’s special genius has been to locate the oracle not in the ‘out there’ of media bombardment” Peter Schjeldahl says “but in the ‘in here’ of her own partly conditioned, partly original mind.” I think Cindy Sherman exhibits this well through her many personas in her images. I feel nowadays many advertisements get by on the sole fact of sex appeal. Companies create unlikely yet enticing situations with characters that only exist in ‘perfect Old Navy world’. These ads create images that people feel they must emulate, again being judged by those who consume the product, or those to ‘choose’ not to. Despite willingly denouncing corporate products, people are still judged because of the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, and even the food they eat. Cindy Sherman saw these along with the addition of film and television and their effects on culturally collective thought.