Behind the Mask—Abe Frajndlich and Cindy Sherman, at Emily Davis Gallery

One of the small handful of Cleveland artists with an international following, the photographer Abe Frajndlich, is almost invisible here in Cleveland because his career took an international turn.   For over fifteen years he photographed celebrities, from rock stars to celebrated authors, for the weekend edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the major newspaper in Frankfurt.  As a consequence he’s better known in Germany than in the United States.   The two major museum retrospectives of his work have been held in Frankfurt and Munich, and the main publisher of his books, Schirmer Mosel, is based in Munich.  

But Abe has always maintained close ties to Cleveland, where he currently resides, and a current  exhibition, Cindy Sherman Unmasked, at the Emily Davis Gallery of the University of Akron, highlights one of the most notable projects of his entire artistic career, when he was based here in Cleveland and just starting to take on projects as a professional photographer. 

Cindy Sherman Unmasked captures the moment when a star was born.   Today Cindy Sherman is an art world superstar whose work has sold for staggering prices and who has been featured in solo exhibitions in major museums worldwide.  But in 1984 she was an up-and-coming artist, just thirty years old.  It was essentially a bit of dumb luck that Abe got to photograph her, through his friendship with Sandy Hensel, who handled publicity at the Akron Museum, where Cindy had her first museum show in the United States.  Abe’s first series of photographs of Cindy were published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, to accompany an article by their art critic at the time, Helen Cullihan. 

Three years later, Cindy’s star was rising, but no one yet realized what a superstar she would become, and Abe was assigned to do a photo shoot of her for Vanity Fair, because their lead photographer, Annie Leibowitz, was tied up photographing people who were more important.  In addition to the story in Vanity Fair, some of these photographs were also published in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung.

Cindy Sherman’s work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.  The youngest of five children, Cindy Sherman was a lonely child who spent much of her time dressing up as other characters.  Her breakthrough work is generally considered to be the collection Untitled Film Stills, a set of 70 black-and-white photographs which portray her in stereotypical female roles, and which often make reference to B-movies and other forms of popular culture.   They explore issues of role-playing and gender identity, and they move photography out of the realm of mere documentation into that of conceptual art.  While in art school she initially focused on painting, Sherman abandoned paint when she realized that she was spending most of her time just struggling with technique.  “I realized that I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.” 

What Abe recognized from the first is that Cindy’s photographs are not self-portraits in the usual sense.  Rather than revealing who she is as a person, they are a form of concealment.  She is a chameleon.  Notably, her working process is very private.  Rather than working with a team, she herself plays the role of producer, costumer, make-up artist, theater-director and photographer. Indeed, in studying her work, Abe recognized that in fact Cindy is very shy, and consequently when he met up with her for his first shoot he brought two masks—one black, one white—that she could hide behind.  Thanks to this gesture, they established an immediate rapport. As Abe recalls:

“Those were the halcyon days of photographic portraiture, where most artist/subjects knew what a photo shoot involved, and were willing to give a photographer the time needed to create the visual story.  There was no better subject, than someone as open and unaffected as the Cindy Sherman I worked with that spring.”

At his second shoot for Vanity Fair and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Abe spent three days with Cindy, photographing her both close-up, without make-up, and in the setting of her studio, surrounded by the prosthetic devices and paraphernalia that she employs when making her photographs.  The result is a series of photographs that establish an interesting dialogue with Cindy’s own work, at the moment when she was just finding herself as an artist.  As it were, they show Cindy behind her mask—and at the same time they enhance the mystery of who she really is.  As Abe remarks:

When these photographs were taken, Cindy was not yet a major star, and not yet a major art-brand tightly protected by art dealers and handlers.  There was still a large element of innocence and uncertainty in her art.  In these photographs you’ll see many facets of the artist we know today through her astonishing range of different guises…  And you’ll also get an opportunity to glimpse some of the accomplished artifice behind this phenomenon, that to say is of the masks, prosthetics and costumes that filled her studio, and of the rather shy young person who expressed herself through all these different masks, without ever quite giving her real self away. 

Cindy is a master of theatrical self-expression, and also a master of artifice–of hiding.    While these photographs reveal a private side of Cindy that we usually don’t get to see, perhaps in the end they only make her identity and her world-renowned artistic achievement more compelling, enigmatic, and mysterious. 

There’s no other body of photographs of Cindy that similarly steps behind the walls which she has built to hide behind, in her ever-more-elaborate game of self-concealment.  A major body of work in their own right, Abe’s photo series, like Cindy’s art, pose probing questions about the nature of disguise and personal identity, and reverberate with many layers of meaning.  And the series creates a fascinating complement to Cindy’s own work, working in counterpoint with it like that of a second voice in one of Bach’s fugues.

Cindy Sherman UnMasked: Photographs by Abe Frajndlich
October 9 – November 26, 2025

Emily Davis Gallery
University of Akron
150 East Exchange Street
Akron, Ohio 44325

Concurrently on view:

Portrait of the Artist
Self-portraits by artists of the region, including: Anna Arnold, Taylor Clapp, Abe Frajndlich, Kalia Horner, Ashley Kouri, Nick Lee, Clarence Meriweather, Emily Olszewski, Frank Oriti, Anna Young, Katarina Zuder