Your First Lesson on Cindy Sherman: What to Cover and How

The first lesson on Cindy Sherman has a natural advantage: her images are immediately gripping, and identity is a subject Years 9-12 students are already living. In line with the Australian Curriculum's Visual Arts strands of making and responding, this opening lesson should introduce staged photography, sequence the key ideas clearly, and end with a check for understanding you can rely on. Here is a ready-to-run structure that gets students looking hard and thinking critically from the very first minute.

Hook with a single provocation

Project one image from Cindy Sherman – Staged Photography and Identity and ask a single question: "Is this a portrait of a real person?" Give pairs two minutes to argue it out. The tension that she is both the photographer and the figure, yet the figure is a fiction, is the engine of the whole topic, and starting with disagreement means students are invested before you have explained anything. Capture their reasoning on the board so you can return to it later. Resist the urge to resolve the debate too quickly; the productive discomfort of not knowing whether the image is truth or performance is exactly the state you want students in as you begin teaching.

Sequence the core ideas

Introduce only the spine of the topic in lesson one. A clear order keeps the ideas from blurring together.

1. Staging: everything in the frame is a deliberate construction.
2. The artist as subject: she performs characters rather than portraying herself.
3. Identity as performance: the work questions whether any image of a person is "true".
4. Technique carries meaning: costume, lighting, and pose build the character.

Model close looking with a worked example

Demonstrate the thinking you want. Take one image and narrate the move aloud: describe what she has constructed, name the technique, then interpret the character it produces. This describe-name-interpret template gives students a reliable way into any staged image, and because it is a template rather than a set answer, it works on images they have never seen, which is what a responding task or exam demands. Model it slowly, pausing to show that you are choosing evidence deliberately rather than guessing. To show that construction is a wider artistic strategy, briefly connect it to the built photographic worlds in Andreas Gursky – Digital Large-Format Photography, and note how questions of surface and reality also run through Gerhard Richter – Between Photorealism and Abstraction, so students see Sherman within a bigger conversation rather than as an isolated case.

Check understanding before they leave

End with a task that shows you who has grasped the core idea.

• Three constructions: students name three staged elements in a new image.
• One-sentence interpretation: what character do those choices build?
• Real-or-fiction check: students restate why the "portrait" is a construction.
• Lingering question: each student writes one thing they want to explore next.

Reading those exit responses tells you precisely where to pick up, and the lingering questions students write often become the hook for lesson two. A first lesson built this way leaves students with a working definition of staged photography, a repeatable method for analysing an image, and a genuine curiosity about how identity gets constructed, which is the strongest start you could give the unit.

Related reading from the Teacher Hub

• Meaningful Homework and Independent Practice for Cindy Sherman
• Building Academic Vocabulary in Andreas Gursky
• How to Teach Graphic Novel and Comic in Art Lessons: A Step-by-Step Lesson Plan (Grades 7–12)