ZURICH.- The Board of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation has awarded the 2012 Roswitha Haftmann Prize – worth CHF 150,000 – to the American artist Cindy Sherman (born 1954). Sherman is one of the leading exponents of staged photography. She uses mostly herself – her own body – as her model; yet the concept underlying her work is anything but self-referential. She has reinvented role photography. Her roleplay, which begins in the studio as a performance, ultimately reaches its audience in the form of a photograph. Her works transcend the boundaries of the exhibitionistic, and are all the more provocative because they are not intended to be viewed as self-portraits. Rather, through her alternating roles, Sherman parodies stereotypical representations of womanhood and explores the meaning of female identity in a male-dominated society. She investigates the processes of physi