A completely different kind of photographer from our hero, Errol Morris,  Cindy Sherman is more classically defined as an artist.  With all the wonders as well as baggage that come with that term.  Although artists have sometimes been heroic, the recent trend has included plenty of fashionistas.  Cindy Sherman challenges; decide for yourself.  A retrospective show opens today, showing 35 years of her photography.  The New York Times review, titled Photography’s Angel Provocateur, has a nicely turned phrase about the show and how the viewer is:

…confronted by an artist with an urgent, singularly personal vision, who for the past 35 years has consistently and provocatively turned photography against itself. She comes across here as an increasingly vehement avenging angel waging a kind of war with the camera, using it to expose what might be called both the tyranny and the inner lives of images, especially the images of women that bombard and shape all of us at every turn.

The closing statement in the review is also a primer on why the show might be worth a visit, even for someone who does not follow photography as art, or Cindy Sherman as one of its geniuses:

If this show does not go all out for Ms. Sherman, it is still a gift, one that reminds us, when we especially need reminding, what it takes to be a great artist. Although not one of her images qualifies, exactly, as a self-portrait, the Modern’s show is above all an inspiring portrait of the artist ceaselessly at work, striving never to repeat herself, always trying to go deeper and further in one direction or another. Her self — remorseless, generous, imaginative and shrewd — is everywhere.