NARCISSISM MAY BE AT THE CORE OF SOME ARTISTIC PRACTICE, but rarely is it flaunted so grandly as in the work of Cindy Sherman. She has denied that her photographs are self-portraiture, but despite her assumption of various guises—sometimes so laden with prosthetics and wigs and costumes that she is unrecognizable—we know it is Cindy Sherman underneath because that is her modus operandi. And we know that because she is one of the most renowned and most influential of contemporary artists today.

A major retrospective of Sherman has been long due, and MoMA New York launched “Cindy Sherman” earlier this year. When the show opened this summer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (ending October 8), so did another show featuring a woman photographer on the other side of town, the Legion of Honor’s “Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism” (ending October 14). This set me to thinking about these two women, born a couple generations apart, and how differently the course of their careers ran, partly due to temperament and partly due to the times.

Lee Miller was born over a century ago, in 1907, and had an extraordinary life in the arts in New York and Paris. She hobnobbed with the Surrealists, was photographed and was a photographer forVogue and other top publications, then she gave up photography in 1953. Cindy Sherman was born a year after that, in 1954, a baby boomer fortunate enough to discover her métier early, while still a student at Buffalo State College. She came of age as conceptual art and photography were both becoming part of the art scene, and her genius was to blend them with identity politics.

As a student Sherman had begun using herself as subject and object of her photography. In those pre-digital days, she even hand-cut multiples of herself and pasted them together, like a time-lapse sequence or a chorus line. The short film she made combining such figures and stop-motion, Doll Clothes (1975), is a highlight of the show. She was already exploring the nature of identity, specifically the female identity, and the pernicious influence of cultural norms and the media. From the beginning she worked solo—doing the hair and makeup, assembling the costume, arranging the set and the lighting, and shooting the picture.

I do love the “Untitled Film Stills” series (1977—80), which features Sherman dressed up in the style of starlets from films of the 1950s and 1960s, a series which was smart and innovative for the way it both highlighted and questioned how women had been depicted in cinema. The full set of 70 is shown here. My favorite is her “centerfolds” series (1981)—large color photographs in which she set herself up as subject of a men’s magazine spread. By now she had mastered commercial lighting techniques, so the photographs look beautiful and lush, and there’s an intensity about her acting for the camera. In a rare 1985 interview with Bomb magazine, she said, “When I became involved with close-ups I needed more information in the expression. I couldn’t depend on background or atmosphere. I wanted the story to come from the face.” These women are lying on the floor, a crumpled bed or a sofa, and they look anxious, pensive, in a daze. They all seem to be asking one question: “What will become of me?” It’s hard not to see some self-identification in these portraits—after all, Sherman is playing women her own age—and that makes these photographs some of the richest in her oeuvre.

More recent series have pulled further and further away from self—such as the history portraits (1989—90) where she emulates figures and poses from Old Master paintings, “clowns” (2003&mdash04) in which she is dressed like circus clowns, and society portraits (2008) showing Palm Beach—type dowagers with heavy makeup and bad wigs.

Lee Miller is not as well-known as Sherman but has had a revival in the last decade or so. She is often known for the famous men she had liaisons with, including Man Ray and Picasso, and the Legion of Honor show is posited as being about Man Ray and Lee Miller, their relationship and their influence on each other. After a modeling career in New York—yes, she was blonde and gorgeous—Miller became interested in photography. In 1929, she went to Paris, located Man Ray and announced that she was going to study with him. They lived together from 1929 to 1932, evolving from teacher/student to lovers. The show includes their early experiments with solarization, which they discovered together, according to a 1975 interview with Miller.

“For Miller, the camera and the photograph as objects cut two ways,” Linda Hartigan writes in the show’s catalog. “They were the vehicles for objectifying her, initially by her father the amateur photographer and then by photographers from the worlds of fashion, journalism and art.” At the beginning, Miller, like centuries of women before her, surrendered to that kind of attention, attention lavished on their physical beauty, their appearance. They surrendered to the male gaze. Two photographs in the exhibition show us the difference between the male gaze and female self-regard. One is Man Ray’s soft-focus Lee Miller Nude with Sunray Lamp(1929), in which she sits on a blanket, her head bent down, her legs demurely crossed. Nearby is Miller’s Self Portrait (1930), where she’s sitting upright, both arms raised to show her musculature, and her face turned boldly into the light source. It’s a powerful, assertive pose.

Miller understood the objectifying, and in the early ’30s said, “I would rather take a picture than be one.” She had already set up her own studio in 1930, and at the end of 1932 she left Paris and Man Ray and went to New York. She found portraiture and commercial work. Eventually, the two became friends and saw each other on occasion in Europe and in the United States.

Man Ray went on to make assemblage, paintings and conceptual work. Apparently he kept a torch burning for her, despite other women he would have in his life. There’s something rather creepy about the fact that he so objectified Miller that she became, in his work, a detached physical detail such as an eye or a pair of lips. The eye he set on his famous metronome is said to be her eye (called Indestructible Object, it was meant to be smashed with a hammer), and the giant pair of lips floating in the sky in his 1935-38 painting, A l’Heure de l’Observatoire—Les Amoureux, are said to be her lips.

Miller had a restless spirit. When World War II came, she become a photojournalist and went to Europe for Vogue. (Man Ray, however, escaped the war by relocating to LA&mdahshhe was, after all, an American.) She covered the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and was one of the first Allied photographers to enter the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau after the defeat of Nazi Germany. In Leipzig she photographed the corpses of the mayor and his wife and daughter, who committed suicide in his office. The exhibition includes Miller’s contact sheet, and the shot I find especially haunting is the one in which Miller framed the daughter on one chair, the mother on another nearby, their slumped bodies echoing each other. Another shot is of two shaven-headed French women, out in the street and harassed for being collaborators with the enemy. These photographs are a terrible testament to war and its effects on women, something Miller seemed especially sensitive to.

Indeed, so sensitive it eventually sent her into a depression. Although she continued to work forVogue after the war, she was haunted by the limp and mangled bodies she had seen in Europe. She began to drink heavily and, as her son says, went on a “downward spiral.” Miller pretty much gave up photography in 1953, and died in 1977. It’s a tragic story, but a real one. The Ray/Miller exhibition tells us something about Miller’s character, both her strength and her vulnerability, and her connection to the world around her. Miller’s journey with photography ultimately provided a deeper look into the human condition.

The same cannot be said for Cindy Sherman, whose exploration of surface has become, well, even more superficial. The people she portrays/photographs in her society portraits are shells of people, with their tight smiles and overdone coiffure. In some ways, her clown series hits the target, as clowns are overdressed and over-the-top by definition, and their painted faces always mask true identity. However, I feel more distanced from Sherman’s newer images, and in the case of society portraits, I wonder if the straight-on photographs of Yvonne Venegas or Lauren Greenfield don’t tell us more about the women of the moneyed class.

Perhaps Sherman’s shifting disguise is losing its impact, and women photographers using a documentary approach, as Miller did, and as Venegas, Greenfield and even Catherine Opie do, are more effective, at least for me. Sherman is trying to update by going digital as in the mural at the SFMOMA exhibition, now with digitally morphed faces and dressed up as eccentrics. I’m not sure what’s new or revelatory here, but that’s still Cindy beneath her camouflage.