A distraught woman leans against the wall of a shabby motel, the contents of her suitcase strewn across the bed. Another, elegantly dressed in a grey suit and neat straw hat, glances warily to her left as she edges past the skyscrapers that loom behind her; while a third sullenly gathers the groceries that have spilled across her kitchen floor. We think we know the characters that populate Cindy Sherman’s groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) series. They seem to have sprung from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the French New Wave and Italian neorealism and yet there is something we can’t quite put our finger on. Frozen in a single moment with no past or future, they leave us to speculate on what led them to this point and where they are headed.

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“Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means,” says Grace Kelly to James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a key influence on the series. Like Sherman, Stewart’s character is a photographer. Temporarily confined to a wheelchair after an accident, he passes the time by observing his neighbours and concocting stories of love, murder and intrigue based solely on what he can see.