Laurie Simmons

Laurie Simmons is a photographer and filmmaker whose work has helped define conceptual photography as a central form of contemporary art. She began her career in the 1970s, as part of the Pictures Generation. Throughout series, her work returns to questions of gender, identity, and self-presentation. Several key projects draw on imagery from postwar American domestic life — such as replicas of suburban interiors and 1950s dolls — to create staged scenes that examine the ideals of prosperity and feminine domesticity, often with a sense of humor. 

Simmons grew up on Long Island in the postwar suburbs, among mass-produced homes, appliances, and furniture shaped by conformity and accumulation. Early on, she worked as a freelance photographer for a dollhouse miniature company, a position both idiosyncratic and reflective of a culture built on plastic and replication. This personal and cultural background comes together in her work. In Interiors (1978), she stages domestic life as a set, meticulously arranging miniature dollhouses and figurines. Working in reduced scale and synthetic materials, she renders the ideals of domesticity and femininity as plainly manufactured and faintly absurd. This constructed approach represents a major shift from the documentary genre that fueled photography in the previous decade; rather than recording the world, Simmons used the camera to reassemble it. 

In 1984, Simmons was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and later that decade she developed her Walking Objects series. Oversized everyday items — a house, a handbag, a frosted birthday cake — appear life-sized and alive, supported by human legs or plastic doll limbs. These images extend Simmons’ interest in consumer culture — how individuals are defined by what surrounds them — as well as gender roles, especially how women are treated as things to be displayed, used, or consumed. A group of works made with fellow artist and friend Jimmy DeSana, including Walking Camera (Jimmy the Camera), stands among the most iconic from the series.

Subsequent bodies of work, including Clothes Make the Man (1991), the Music of Regret series (1994–97), and The Instant Decorator (2004), continue this line of inquiry. Her film The Music of Regret (2006), featuring Meryl Streep, vintage puppets, and Alvin Ailey dancers, brings these concerns into a cinematic register. In more recent years, Simmons has extended this work through series such as The Love Doll (2009–11), How We See (2014–15), and Some New (2018), continuing to examine femininity, artifice, and identity through increasingly elaborate, often color-saturated productions across photography, performance, and moving image. 

Simmons’ work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at MoMA P.S. 1; the Walker Art Center, MN; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, amongst others. A longtime resident of New York City, she now lives and works in Connecticut.