Her face hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and sells for millions, yet almost no one could pick her out of a lineup, and she insists she has never taken a self-portrait. This episode traces the architecture of identity built by Cindy Sherman, from a Long Island childhood shaped by an accommodating mother and a cruel authoritarian father, through a failed freshman photography class at Buffalo State, to her place as a defining pillar of the Pictures Generation and a MacArthur fellow.

We follow the thrift-store characters she wore to college parties, the founding of Hallwalls with Robert Longo in 1974, and the 70 Untitled Film Stills made alone between 1977 and 1980, including the desert highway shot where her father pressed the shutter. Then we move through the Centerfolds a magazine refused to print, the debate over the 1976 Bus Riders series, the grotesque prosthetics and mannequins of the Sex Pictures, the failed film Office Killer, the Society Portraits, Imitation of Life, and the distorted face-tuned Instagram selfies she has woven into massive tapestries.

• Why painting felt like red tape and why the Ansel Adams zone system bored her
• How a photo her father clicked redefines who counts as the author of an image
• The bait-and-switch of the Centerfolds and the academic theory she called bullshit
• Removing her own body from the frame to sabotage the market that wanted it
• What her career predicted about a world where everyone curates a fictional self