THE WILD WEST

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #43, 1979. 9x7"

Monument Valley. The most famous and iconic western landscape that appears in quintessential western genre films such as Stagecoach (Dir. John Ford, 1939) and The Searchers (Dir. John Ford, 1956). What’s interesting about Monument Valley is our desire to constantly film it, photograph it and travel through it -- it’s almost as if we want to escape society and our cities for this untouched open landscape, yet we can’t let go completely and thus name it something to keep it a part of society: monuments are structures that are man-made buildings.

Cindy Sherman is posed here as the archetypal frontier woman. Her body language is very telling: the way in which she touches the tree with her left hand while planting her right foot on the branch indicates possession; this woman is claiming the west as hers. Her visionary upward gaze tells of an optimistic sense of longing for discovery and exploration. While her bare feet again play into the image of a strong independent woman, her orderly coiffed hair and the modest position of her right hand keeping her dress in place suggest an inability to let the traditional image of femininity go to the wind. She struggles with this dual identity, which is even apparent in the photograph’s composition. In choosing to set up her tripod with the mature tree in the foreground and the desert of Monument Valley covered by the tree, yet still apparent in the background, Sherman alludes to the inability of a woman to fully abandon the security of a planted life and embrace the vast openness and unknown that is symbolized by the sweeping desert and big sky.