As part of its 'Collecting Online' monthly programme, Baldwin is pleased to present a curated selection of works by Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin.

For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation-a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo - ho came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art. Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, "I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character." Shortly after moving to New York, she produced her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), in which she put on guises and photographed herself in various settings with deliberately selected props to create scenes that resemble those from mid-20th-century B movies. Started when she was only 23, these images rely on female characters (and caricatures) such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover and the vulnerable naif. Sherman used cinematic conventions to structure these photographs: they recall the film stills used to promote movies, from which the series takes its title. The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works. Sherman has continued to transform herself, displaying the diversity of human types and stereotypes in her images. She often works in series, improvising on themes such as centerfolds (1981) and society portraits (2008). ~~~ Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin's intimate images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her, especially in the LGBTQ community and the heroin-addicted subculture. Her opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980-1986) is a 40-minute slideshow of 700 photographs set to music that chronicled her life in New York during the 1980s. The Ballad was first exhibited at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was made into a photobook the following year. "For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody-it's a caress," she said of the medium. "I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul."