Cindy Sherman is one of the leading American artists of our time, creating staged and manipulated photographs that draw on popular culture and art history to explore female identity. By examining visually the ways in which gender is dressed, made up and culturally enforced, she has for many become an icon of feminism and postmodernism, and the visceral physicality of her photographs is the key to their dramatic power. In this retrospective the essayists Amanda Cruz, Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Amelia Jones offer insights from several distinct vantage points, placing her work within the trajectory of feminist art history and revealing her influence on the art of the last twenty years. More than 270 images show the breadth of her work, from the Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s to series such as Centrefolds, Fashion, Disasters, Fairy Tales and History Portraits, as well as photographs influenced by Surrealist artists. The book also includes excerpts from her notebooks, selections from her contact sheets and numerous Polaroid studies that shed light on her process.