Published by Baldwin Gallery/Salon 94 Gallery/Tomio Koyama Gallery/Wilkinson Gallery. Edited by Lynne Tillman. Introduction by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Text by Laurie Simmons.
Throughout her career, photographer Laurie Simmons (1949) has staged scenes with dolls, dummies and occasionally people for her camera. In the fall of 2009, Simmons opened a new chapter to her work and ordered a customized, high-end “Love Doll” from Japan. The surrogate sex partner arrived in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and genitalia. Simmons documented her photographic relationship with this human scale “girl,” depicting the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of “actions”--each shown and titled chronologically from the day Simmons received the doll up to the present, describing the relationship she developed with her model. The first days of somewhat formal and shy poses give way to an ever-increasing familiarity and comfort level as time passes. A second doll arrived one year later. This new character, and the interaction between the two, reveal yet another dynamic in composition, both formal and psychological. In search of a stage for her Love Doll, Simmons turned to her own home, transforming it into an artfully staged, color coordinated, oversized dollhouse. A tale of disquieting adult fantasy, desire and regret, The Love Doll accompanies the complete photographic series with the artist’s diary entries and is printed on a special paper to evoke the touch of a Love Doll’s skin.
Published by Skarstedt Fine Art. Interview by James Welling.
Color Coordinated Interiors catalogues a little known but characteristic and illuminating early project of Laurie Simmons's from 1983, just a few years after her first solo show in New York. Simmons is best known for her chilling and sophisticated photographs of dolls and dollhouses--seminal works that can be found in the greatest collections of contemporary art throughout the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Here, Simmons created miniature spaces using projection and illusion rather than glue-and-board craft, casting photographs behind dolls and lighting her tiny models starkly with flashlights--they're "Teenettes," three-inch-high Japanese figures whose clothes and hairstyles are all molded from the same single piece of brightly-colored plastic. The Teenettes' features are fuzzy by nature, but the scenes behind them here are photographed so that piping on every pillow pops out. This guided tour, with an interview by California artist James Welling, puts this newly collected work in context.
PUBLISHER Skarstedt Fine Art
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8 x 10 in. / 56 pgs / 21 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/1/2007 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2007 p. 114
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780970909060TRADE List Price: $30.00 CDN $35.00
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.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 11 in. / 156 pgs / 100 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/15/2005 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781931788595TRADE List Price: $50.00 CDN $60.00
Published by Carolina Nitsch Editions. Edited by Carolina Nitsch. Essays by Carol Squiers and Laurie Simmons.
Laurie Simmons has been dealing with issues from In and Around the House since the mid-1970s. Her seminal early work was some of the first to use set-up photography to create images with intensely psychological subtexts and forcefully feminist content. The 1950s-style constructed interiors used dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props, postcards, interior decoration books, pamphlets and magazines to create images that questioned female stereotypes and American clichés with humor and charm. Though they were shot both in color and black, the latter have remained woefully under-published and are presented here, for the first time, in full, along with a critical essay by Carol Squiers, curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, and a personal account by Simmons herself.
PUBLISHER Carolina Nitsch Editions
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11.5 x 9.5 in. / 104 pgs.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/2/2003 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2003
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780974066608TRADE List Price: $39.95 CDN $50.00
Published by Skarstedt Fine Art. Artwork by Laurie Simmons. Photographs by Collier Schorr.
In a 1992 interview, Laurie Simmons stated that, in her first body of color works, she was “trying to recreate a feeling, a mood from the time I was growing up: a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time.” Reproduced here, her early series Interiors and Big Figures depict a post-World War II, 50s suburbia through plastic housewife and cowboy dolls placed in constructed interiors and manipulated exteriors. While the dolls provide a sense of play, the reality of the images they model is unavoidable. The female is pictured in the home, but she is alone, isolated, and vulnerable. The cowboy exudes the confidence and independence of a life of adventure, but he cannot escape the implied violence, racism and paternalism that also characterize his ideal.
PUBLISHER Skarstedt Fine Art
BOOK FORMAT Clothbound, 9 x 8 in. / 71 pgs / 47 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/2/2003 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2003
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780970909039TRADE List Price: $30.00 CDN $35.00
Laurie Simmons: Color Coordinated Interiors 1983
Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying
Laurie Simmons: In And Around The House
Laurie Simmons: Photographs 1978/79