Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmons, foto: Danielle Bartholomew
Laurie Simmons was born in 1949 in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, New York. She began photographing at the age of six, when her father bought her a Brownie camera. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1971 and two years later moved to the SoHo neighbourhood of New York. Her first photographs were portraits of friends, but she began photographing toys—in particular dolls from the 1950s that she had purchased at an antiquated toy store in the Catskills—after working as a freelance photographer for a dollhouse miniature company. In works such as Jane (1976), Simmons photographed her dolls with dramatic lighting so that they resemble images of people, a practice that allied her with contemporaneous photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Her work was entirely in black-and-white until 1977, at which point she turned exclusively to color; in 1981, she returned to black-and-white with a haunting series of dolls floating underwater.
