Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Entry Gallery, Floor 7

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Selected works from the seventh-floor entry gallery appear in this section.

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WALKING CAMERA II (JIMMY THE CAMERA), 1987

Old camera sitting on top of two legs.
Old camera sitting on top of two legs.

Laurie Simmons (b. 1949), Walking Camera II (Jimmy the Camera), 1987. Gelatin silver print, Overall: 82 13/16 × 47 1/2in. (210.3 × 120.7cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee 94.107 © Laurie Simmons

This work had two inspirations: Laurie Simmons’s memory of 1950s-era commercials involving dancing cigarette boxes, and a giant camera costume featured in the 1978 movie The Wiz. Simmons borrowed the prop and photographed her mentor, the artist Jimmy DeSana, wearing it. One of her Walking Objects—staged tableaux of ordinary items on legs—the image conflates the animate and the inanimate, reality and artifice: the camera is anthropomorphized as a ballet dancer, and man becomes machine. Like much of Simmons’s art, this photograph explores through distortions of scale the misrepresentations of mass media. Equally important, it is a whimsical and humorous tribute to a photographer and friend.

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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