Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying (signed edition) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931788596 ISBN 13: 9781931788595

Publisher: Aperture Direct, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Populated by sad, anonymous dolls, walking houses and ventriloquist dummies, Simmons's photographs and installations elicit an unlikely mix of uneasiness and nostalgia. In the 1970s, she crafted miniature dramas of quiet desperation and conspicuous consumption by constructing and photographing tiny, delicate tableaux of solitary female dolls amid mod furnishings and appliances. As Kate Linker points out in her extensive opening essay, the ambivalent relationship between these little people and their various consumer goods has, in some form or another, remained a constant theme throughout the artist's career; Simmons herself calls it "the confusion between ourselves and our possessions." In the 1980s, this confusion became more literal in Simmons's Walking and Lying Objects series, in which purses, cameras and baked goods are pictured with human legs. Perhaps most affecting, thanks in part to this volume's beautiful full-color reproductions, is a later series of portraits of ventriloquist dummies. Atmospherically lit and shot against stylized backgrounds, these figures appear eerily human. But that's nothing compared with the somewhat bizarre culmination of Simmons's work—photographs of the artist herself in the form of a custom-made dummy. All in all, this is an unexpected, visually enticing document of an audacious, odd talent. 104 color images. (Oct.)
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Review:

"One of the first contemporary American photographers to have created elaborately staged narrative photographs, this book concentrates on selected series that illuminate ideas that cut through Simmons entire body of work -- willfully ambiguous interplay between objects, figures and backgrounds, and the way specific things or settings take on strange powers in her photographs." --HotShoe International

"Populated by sad, anonymous dolls, walking houses and ventriloquist dummies, Simmons's photographs and installations elicit an unlikely mix of uneasiness and nostalgia... this is an unexpected, visually enticing document of an audacious, odd talent." --Publishers Weekly

"Walking Talking Lying moves selectively through Simmons's career as an object observer, honing in on her doll works, her eerie ventriloquist dummies (female versions bear her own face), and her jarring images of partly human things, like a walking handbag or a book on legs." --The Village Voice

"Walking Talking Lying focuses on a series of Simmons's photographs that document objects that have somehow acquired human limbs and ventriloquists' dummies as, seemingly off-duty, they lounge around. Looking at them, the viewer is plunged into a world in which nothing seems natural and everything is staged." -- Kate Linker --Modern Painters: International Arts and Culture

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture Direct
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1931788596
• ISBN 13: 9781931788595
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 156