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Laurie Simmons Biography

Laurie Simmons (born October 3, 1949) is an American artist, photographer and filmmaker. 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.:9 She is part of The Pictures Generation, a name given to a group of artists from a 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that includes Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Lawler.

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Laurie Simmons Quotes

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it. " He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

Artist, Dumb, Dumbness, Opening, Remember, Thinking

When you're getting ready, you finally reach a point where your clothes are right and your hair and makeup are right, and you're not comparing yourself to anyone. It's a really great moment. Then you get to the party and it's like, "Oh my god, I'm wearing the wrong thing! I'm garish!" or "I'm underdressed!"

Party, Makeup, Moments, Thing, Reach

My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say "housewife"? A home engineer.

Father, Home, Housewife, Mother

I feel like I've finally got to this place that I really want to be. The place where, in my fantasy, the characters just get up and walk around - this interstitial place between humans and dolls. But I also feel like, where am I supposed to go from here? Because this feels like the place I've always wanted to be, for my whole life of shooting.

Character, Fantasy, Shooting, Walk, Whole, Whole Life

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment. . . I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.

Image, Kids, Mean, Reality, Staging, Thinking

. . . 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.

Faster, Image, Knock, Messages, Scale, Scales

The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling, was, "Will I know when to give up? Will I know when I've suffered enough rejection? Will I know when to get out?"

Artist, Giving Up, Particularly, Struggle, Wondered

I think of scientific veracity as an idea from the past - the scientists say it is so, the photo is proof. Even the authoritative power of the word actual - an actual what? An actual retouched photo, an actual collaged photo?

Authoritative, Idea, Ideas, Past, Power, Thinking

I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.

Artist, Cameras, Like, Turns

When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.

Artist, Cool, Dismissed, Divided, Kind, Warhol

You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.

Know, Know Yourself, Order, Past

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.

Away, Changes, Light, Make, Moving, Thinking

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

Artist, Photo, Picked, Students, Task, World

I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

Perfection, Kind, Gone

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.

Aspect, Important, Playing, Starting, Stopping

The visual world has blown up, the world of writing has blown up; there's so much text online. Anyone and everyone can express themselves. It's a lot to think about as an artist. Also, that the persona of the artist might actually be of some importance. When I came of age, it was important to be quiet and hang back and be mysterious. I knew artists who didn't even want to show up at their own openings. They never wanted to have their picture taken, didn't want to autograph a book, didn't want to answer a question. I came of age in a world where it was "Let the work speak for itself. "

Age, Book, Let, Quiet, Taken, Writing

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.

Dark, Doll, Men, Scary, Shoot

I remember years ago hearing a gynecologist say, "Women report a great sense of calm and well-being post-menopause. " This was way before I was even thinking about it, but I thought, "Hmm, that might be something to look forward to. A sense of well-being!"

Thinking, Calm, Remember, Years, Hmm, Women

I'm not interested in telling a story in my photographic work. I'm more interested in freezing certain moments in time.

Certain, Freezing, Moments, Stories, Telling, Work

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll 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.

Camera, Challenges, Investment, Make, Moving, Thinking

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