This image started everything.

I remember at somewhere around age 11 going to the Saatchi Gallery for the first time. I waddled around the gargantuan cement space, not that interested, but also quite aware that I had never seen anything like it before.

Even then I was a bit of a speedy gallery go-er, not one to sit and ponder a work for too long.

But when I saw the Cindy Sherman piece –untitled #122, I was dumbstruck, awestruck. I had never seen a photo that big, or at those proportions, and the woman mystified me. Or was it a man, something about her seemed muscular, and the anger, was it feminine?

The wig, the clenched fists, the red, watery eye, the Tippi Hedren-esque suit, all fascinated me. I was quite disturbed but utterly engaged, it stood out, it stared out.

I loved it because I didn’t understand it, why was he/she so angry, why was he/she in a wig, why was the picture so grainy. Colour photography as art was new to me, photography like this was like nothing I'd ever before seen.

That Christmas I asked for a camera, I didn’t know how to use it, so I barely did.

So I finally took a photo class, did really shit in it, the quote on my report card was that my work was, “Random and irregular.” I was 12 for cripe’s sake.

It wasn’t until college that I saw Sherman’s work again -The Film stills. I became infatuated with them, as so many have.

I didn’t realize until later that she had also been responsible for Untitled #122. Funny too that it was for her Fashion series.

The image still confounds me.

-Milla