Laurie Simmons brief bio

Laurie Simmons



Laurie Simmons is one of the first contemporary American photographers to have created elaborately staged narrative photographs. Using dolls to act out piquant scenarios within specially constructed environments, she has slyly commented on contemporary culture while re-creating “a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal.” Prodigiously creative, she has produced fourteen fully developed series since the 1970s.
 

Laurie Simmons was born on Long Island, New York, on October 3, 1949. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 1971.^[1]

Since the mid 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs and occasionally people, to create images with intensely psychological subtexts.

Along with Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art. In the mid-1970s, however, Ms. Simmons was a young art school graduate in New York hoping to support herself as a freelance commercial photographer. Aiming to get a job illustrating a toy company catalog, she photographed dollhouse furniture. She didn’t get the assignment, but she found a vision whose resonant possibilities can be seen in this enchanting exhibition of black-and-white images dating mostly from 1976 and ’77.^[3]

Simmons is particularly interesting and inspiring to me. I feel like categorizing one's art as "feminist art" is similar to categorizing black artists work as "black art". Every thought and interaction can affect your mind, perhaps only subconciously, and whether one is trying or not, unless you are completely dettached it will eventually find its way into your work. We forget what it must have been like for women and African Americans in that time. I still complain now...Simmons work plays with a lot of the 1950's familial ideals, but somewhat objectively and usually humorously. The puppets themselves are art objects which with we "empathize" and are playfully nostalgic. Her work is dark but not violent or forceful.