Laurie Simmons
1949–
Photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons emerged as one of the artists of the Pictures Generation alongside Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman. Named after the landmark exhibition in 1979, these artists challenged, and continue to challenge, the function of images and photography in society by questioning the role that images play, rather than their ability to function as documents. She has said: “I wanted to make pictures that were psychological, political, subversive. Images from my subconscious that could inform.” Simmons’s first series set female figurines inside of dollhouses, depicting domestic spaces and using them to critique representations of women by the media. She continued this work with inanimate subjects, including toy cowboys and ventriloquist dummies.
In the late 1980s Simmons began working on her Walking Objects series. A life-sized costumed camera in the 1978 movie The Wiz triggered a childhood memory of a 1950s cigarette advertisement featuring dancing Chesterfield cigarette boxes. Borrowing the original movie costume, Simmons convinced her friend and mentor, fellow photographer Jimmy De Sana, to don the costume and pose for a series of photographs printed at life-size. De Sana had been diagnosed with AIDS two years earlier, and he struggled under the weight of the costume. After making Walking Camera, Simmons had her sister pose as an oversized walking purse. The series continued, including myriad disparate objects such as guns, houses, and cakes, but all subsequent images were made with doll and mannequin legs. While the spotlit, surreal, and often sardonic photographs in the series would become iconic for challenging the representation of women as “objects” in art history, Walking Camera II (Jimmy the Camera) stands apart as a portrait of Simmons’s now departed friend.
Introduction
Laurie Simmons (born October 3, 1949) is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Simmons's art belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hara Museum (Tokyo) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. She has exhibited at venues including MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center and Whitney Museum. In 1997, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives and works in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut.
Wikidata identifier
Q3219659
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 25, 2025.
Introduction
American photographer.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, photographer
ULAN identifier
500077698
Names
Laurie Simmons
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 25, 2025.
