History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous Photography, Individual Photographers & Professionals, Postmodernism & Staged Photography, Women Photographers
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Overview
Laurie Simmons is one of the first contemporary American photographers to create elaborately staged narrative photographs. Using dolls to act out piquant scenarios within specially constructed environments, she has slyly commented on contemporary culture while recapturing a sense of her childhood in an era she recalls as "both beautiful and lethal." Populated by housewives, ventriloquists' dummies, and familiar objects in unfamiliar guises, her diverse tableaux are often infused with bittersweet nostalgia yet charged with a disquieting sense of dislocation.In Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying, Kate Linker concentrates on selected series-Ventriloquism, Walking and Lying Objects, Clothes Make the Man, Cafe of the Inner Mind, and a range of self-portraits-to illuminate ideas that cut through the artist's entire body of work. Of particular interest are the willfully ambiguous interplay between objects, figures, and backgrounds, and the way specific things (toys, cakes, guns) and settings (suburban interiors in particular) take on strange powers in Simmons's images. As Linker makes clear, the artist's use of narrative links her to a number of contemporary fiction writers, while her exploration of artifice, advertising, childhood memory, and unabashed eclecticism has been a vital factor in postwar photography.
Synopsis
The intimate ache of the dollhouse and its air of manipulation (whether as consumer object or ventriloquist dummy) has become as identified with pioneering photographer Laurie Simmons as with Ibsen. She's even designed a dollhouse for a toy company. Mostly self-taught, Simmons began working in the 1970s, when color and staged tableaux were first being explored by fine-art photographers, and has since mapped out a world all her own, mostly in haunting miniature. Over the past 25 years, her photographs have conveyed a bittersweet nostalgia for the 1950s, while edgily commenting on consumerism, feminism and other fraught aspects of postwar American culture. The accompanying essay by Kate Linker concentrates on selected series that cover the artist's entire oeuvre--from "Ventriloquism," "Walking Objects" and "Lying Objects" to the 1997 "Self-Portraits" and "Café of the Inner Mind"--and so is essential reading for any photography aficionado.Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Populated by sad, anonymous dolls, walking houses and ventriloquist dummies, Simmons's photographs and installations elicit an unlikely mix of uneasiness and nostalgia. In the 1970s, she crafted miniature dramas of quiet desperation and conspicuous consumption by constructing and photographing tiny, delicate tableaux of solitary female dolls amid mod furnishings and appliances. As Kate Linker points out in her extensive opening essay, the ambivalent relationship between these little people and their various consumer goods has, in some form or another, remained a constant theme throughout the artist's career; Simmons herself calls it "the confusion between ourselves and our possessions." In the 1980s, this confusion became more literal in Simmons's Walking and Lying Objects series, in which purses, cameras and baked goods are pictured with human legs. Perhaps most affecting, thanks in part to this volume's beautiful full-color reproductions, is a later series of portraits of ventriloquist dummies. Atmospherically lit and shot against stylized backgrounds, these figures appear eerily human. But that's nothing compared with the somewhat bizarre culmination of Simmons's work-photographs of the artist herself in the form of a custom-made dummy. All in all, this is an unexpected, visually enticing document of an audacious, odd talent. 104 color images. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
Another high-quality offering from Aperture, this is a monograph by and about American photographer and conceptual artist Laurie Simmons (b. 1949), whose work has been exhibited extensively. The book starts with an academic essay by contemporary art critic Kate Linker illuminating Simmons's body of work, which is accompanied by photographs from selected series. Next, it offers Simmons's photographs along with short essays by the photographer herself that lend rare and thoughtful insight into her images. Every one of Simmons's 99 color and black-and-white photographs captures a form, but few if any of these forms are actually human-miniature dolls, mannequins, and ventriloquist dolls give each image a vision of glossy perfection while exuding a sad emptiness. The final pages are devoted to a chronology of Simmons's life and a list of projects in which she's been involved. This cohesive work is recommended for libraries with specialized photography collections.-Valerie Nye, Coll. of Santa Fe Lib., NM Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Book Details
Published
October 3, 2005
Publisher
Aperture
Pages
156
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781931788595