Prior to Sherman, photographers did create artistic images, but they were along the lines of Ansel Adams or Robert Frank. The photograph was treated as a documentary device that recorded for posterity actual occurrences. War photography, the dust bowl in the 1930's, Adams' records of Yosemite, these are what you could think of as pre-Sherman art. Man Ray was about as close as you could get to a real artist, but his surrealist images are almost laughably arcane and naïve today. Sherman took what was in retrospect an obvious step forwards in our lexicon, perhaps inspired by two separate quarters of the advertisement industry and documentary photography. During 1959, Bruce Davidson followed a group of kids around New York, snapping standoffish alienated youths. These photographs feel like they could be straight out of a modern day fashion add and were ahead of their time period. The loosely posed photographs straddled the boundary of fiction and reality, these were actual street toughs, but you can feel the proximity of the camera and read the knowledge of its presence in the actions taken by these kids.

The film studios of the thirties and forties kept photographers on the sets of their larger productions to take stock images of the sets. These photographers would have say Bogart and Peter Lorre pose at a dimly lit table in conversation for the image separate from the actual shooting of footage that would end up in the can. The images would then be developed and sent out to film magazines and newspapers in order to hype the coming release. What made these photos unique was that most of them ended up not having very much to do with the film itself. These photos that captured a momentary narrative played out by one or more actors on a set that existed nowhere outside of the studios. If you were to sit down and watch 'Casablanca,' you would never see a comparable scene caught by the stills taken by the studio photographers on the screen. This entire endeavor was utilitarian.

Secondly, Sherman could have been inspired by magazine advertisements. For example Marlboro and Camel cigarettes placed huge advertising campaigns portraying action scenes caught on camera during the 60's and 70's. Camel used a pre Indiana Jones type and portrayed him making his way down a jungle river, or ruggedly trekking across the plains of Africa. Marlboro on the other hand caught cowboys rustling their way over the American west of the last century. Both of these advertising campaigns were staged, using actors to portray a desired typecast. Both of these campaigns captured a fuzzy narrative where the viewer would be asked to create a situation in order to explain just why these men were where they were.