Since the mid 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs and occasionally people, to create images with intensely psychological subtexts. Laurie Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art.
In the mid-1970s, however, Ms. Simmons was a young art school graduate in New York hoping to support herself as a freelance commercial photographer. Aiming to get a job illustrating a toy company catalog, she photographed dollhouse furniture. She didn’t get the assignment, but she found a vision whose resonant possibilities can be seen in her many enchanting exhibitions.
"Setting up small rooms with dolls in them was a way for me to experience photography without taking my camera out to the street. I felt that I could set up my own world right around me, without ever having to leave the studio...I would set up these interiors and then shoot them at different times during the day as the light changed, and it became, for me, like a type of animation. By moving around the figures, I was, in fact, animating them, even though I was taking still photographs...Scale wasn't an issue to me. If the loaf of bread was half the size of the woman herself, that wasn't a problem. That seemed like it gave it a kind of magic".
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