Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmonsis an American artist, photographer and filmmaker currently working in New York and Northwestern Connecticut. Since the mid-1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs, and people, to create photographs that reference domestic scenes...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth3 October 1949
CountryUnited States of America
messages scales faster
...Let's get to the image as quickly as possible, let's get to the message even faster, and let's find the scale to knock you over the head with the image and the message.
My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'
ideal operate within
I'm innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.
art attached coming crafty found great stigma ways
When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.
artists hours personal themselves
We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.
thinking addiction
I think making features has got to be in the addiction category.
past know-yourself
You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.
artist
I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.
artist people painting
The thing that a lot of people may or may not know is every artist is a cinephile, whether they watch movies whether they're painting, or have films that influence them.
Oh god, success is so exhausting.
dark men scary
I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a male doll, and it always kind of implodes. Whenever I use men, they're so scary and so dark, and I can never find this sort of lightness or this place between doll and human that I find with female dolls.
important stopping aspect
I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.
moving thinking light
The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a [doll's] face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes. Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them. That's something I really wanted to get out there right away.
people dumb copying
I was aware that people thought a certain type of photo work was either stealing, borrowing, copying or dumb.