technically her photographs are not innovative, Cindy
Sherman is considered a major figure of late-century
photography for redefining the artist’s self-portrait
and being largely responsible for the widespread
acceptance of photography as contemporary art; her
most important works,Untitled Film Stills(beginning
in 1977), feature herself as a subject in sophisticated
scenarios that evoke the feeling of remembered pic-
tures. They draw on cultural history—films, literature,
news imagery, popular culture. Sherman’s imaginative
self-representation raises issues of gender and identity.
MarkB. PohladSeealso:Abbott, Berenice; Adams, Ansel; Arbus,
Diane; Atget, Eugene; Bauhaus; Becher, Bernd and Hilla; Blossfeldt, Karl; Bourke-White, Margaret; Brandt, Bill; Brassaı ̈;Bravo,ManuelA ́lvarez; Bru- guiere, Francis; Callahan, Harry; Caponigro, Paul;
Cartier-Bresson, Henri; Chambi, Martin; Clark,
Larry; Cunningham, Imogen; Dada; Davidson,
Bruce; DeCarava, Roy; Domon, Ken; Edgerton, Har-
old; Eggleston, William; Evans, Walker; Frank,
Robert; Futurism; Goldin, Nan; Group f/64; Heart-
field, John; Institute of Design; Ka ̈sebier, Gertrude;
Keı ̈ta, Seydou; Lange, Dorothea; Laughlin, Clarence
John; Surrealism; Man Ray; Meyerowitz, Joel;
Moholy-Nagy, La ́szlo ́; Museum of Modern Art;
Newhall, Beaumont; Penn, Irving; Photo-Secession;
Porter, Eliot; Renger-Patzsch, Albert; Sander,
August; Shahn, Ben; Sherman, Cindy; Siskind,
Aaron; Steichen, Edward; Stieglitz, Alfred; Strand,
Paul; Stryker, Roy; Surrealism; Weegee; White,
Clarence; White, Minor; Winogrand, GarryFurther Reading
Davis, Keith F.An American Century of Photography, From
Dry-Plate to Digital: The Hallmark Photographic Collec-
tion. Kansas City, MO, and New York: Hallmark Cards,
Inc. in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., second
edition, 1999.
Debroise, Olivier.Mexican Suite: A History of Photography
in Mexico. Translated and revised by Stella de Sa ́Rego.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Lahs-Gonzalez, Olivia and Lucy Lippard.Women Photo-
graphers of the 20th Century. St. Louis, MO: St. Louis
Art Museum, 1997.
Newhall, Beaumont.The History of Photography. New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982.
Rosenblum, Naomi.A History of Women Photographers.
New York: Abbeville Press, 1994.
Rosenblum, Naomi.A World History of Photography. 3rd
ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997.
Thomas, Ann.Beauty of Another Order: Photography in
Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Warner, Mary.Photography: A Cultural History. New
York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 2002.
Weiermair, Peter and Gerald Matt, eds.Japanese Photogra-
phy: Desire and Void. Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1997.
Willis, Deborah.Reflections in Black: A History of Black
Photographers 1840 to the Present. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2000.HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY:
INTERWAR YEARS
Photography as it was practised in Europe, the Uni-
ted States, and Japan during the period from 1918 to
1941 closely parallels the hopes, doubts, and fears of
Western societies confronted with the future of the
great project of the Enlightenment and its demo-
cratic ethos. Seeds planted earlier fully bloomed
for better or for worse in that ideologically intense
period, which experienced the development of uto-
pian totalitarianisms in Europe and the success and
extraordinary failures of financial capitalism, thus
questioning the theoretical models of the modern
State. In those years, the world was still a coherent
and fairly simple place where old powers reigned,
even though the catastrophe of the Great War,
World War I, was already shifting the center of
gravity towards the United States, but not yet
towards the rest of the world, which still remained
more or less under forms of imperial domination.
Such a situation explains the violent oppositions in
the culture of the period, as well as its surprising
vitality: widely believed was the idea that only cul-
ture could save man from himself, and more pre-HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: INTERWAR YEARS