61 As a student at Buffalo State College in New York State (1972–1976), the young artist did not focus exclusively on photography, but also worked in the medium of film in a course taught by experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits. The short black-and-white silent film Doll Clothes (1975, 2:22 minutes), whose protagonist is a cut-out photograph of the artist herself, was made as an assignment for Sharits’s class. In an act of nascent autonomy and emancipation, Sherman’s stop-motion-animated paper proxy chooses between different outfits but is abruptly interrupted by the intervention of an oversized hand. Sherman used these cut-outs until her move to New York City in 1977 to stage herself in different roles, develop complex pictorial narratives, and to address current issues in a playful or critical manner. The covers of renowned glossy fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle or Vogue were the starting point for Cover Girls (1975/2011), a series of five three-part works. While the first image in each triptych is a photograph of the original magazine cover, Sherman inserts herself into the other two cover images, replacing the models’ faces with her own in a painstaking analog cut-andpaste process. In the second image, for example, she manages an almost perfect approximation of the original, whereas in the last cover her facial expressions shift into the grotesque. In ironic exaggeration, Sherman questions the normative ideals of beauty we find ourselves confronted with wherever we go – not only in the form of magazine covers but also in adverts in public spaces. It was in the latter context that the works were debuted in 1976, when they were installed in the advertising spaces on the top deck of a bus as part of the month-long Photo Bus exhibition project jointly organized by the CEPA Gallery and the Niagara Frontier Transit Metro System. EARLYWORKS
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