In 1977, at twenty-three, Sherman began making a series of black-and-white photographs in New York. She appears in every frame: the wig, make-up, costume and pose change, and the scene looks lifted from a B movie, a film noir or a European art film. Neither the films nor the characters existed. The series closed in 1980 at seventy images.

Its force lies in how immediately a viewer 'recognises' each frame. Nobody has seen these films, yet everyone knows these women: the young woman walking alone in the city, the housewife pausing in the kitchen, the hitchhiker waiting at the roadside. Sherman thereby shows that the image of a woman belongs not to a particular person but to a vocabulary of images already in circulation. Using her own face sharpens the point: these are not self-portraits, because there is no fixed self on offer — identity changes with the costume in every frame.

The series moved to the centre of the generation later called the Pictures Generation and of postmodern art theory; in arguments running from Douglas Crimp to Laura Mulvey it became the standing example for representation, the gaze and masquerade. A side effect matters almost as much as the work: it changed photography's standing in the art market. The Museum of Modern Art bought the complete set in 1995, and in 2011 a single frame sold at auction for $3.9 million, then a record for a photograph — a symbolic threshold in a reproducible medium being counted as an original work.