Laurie Simmons was born October 3, 1949 in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York. A daughter to her mother Dorothy Simmons a housewife and father Samuel Ira Simmons a dentist. Both of Simmons parents were Jewish and was raised in a Jewish community. Laurie Simmons is an American artist, filmmaker, and photographer. Simmons completed an education of a BFA degree from the Tyler School of Art university in 1971. Since during in the mid-1970s, she has staged photos with her camera of dolls, ventriloquist dummies, and people, to create photographs that are reference to domestic life scenes.
Most of Laurie Simmons’ works concerns feminism or the role of woman in society. Her props that are featured in her photos are consumer items such as dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs, and people to make a statement about the old fashioned traditional roles of gender in society. In 1972, she found a vintage dollhouse in a toy store in Liberty, New York. This was during the second wave of feminism, where dolls were viewed skeptically or biased by many that say that dolls were meant for girls to play. Simmons was drawn to the weird, strongly gendered appeal of dolls and dollhouses and began photographing them in her works.
Why I chose Laurie Simmons is because her works are very interesting with the usage of props such as dolls, dummies, and people to recreate photos of domestic scenes. The photos are very unique to the eyes with every picture photo representing something to the themes she is showing in the photos.
The photo content is a doll house room of a bedroom with subject being a female doll inside, and there is a book lying on the bed. The female doll seems to be getting up from the bed after reading her book, probably because she had something to do so it paused her reading time. How I relate to this photo is that whenever I’m reading in certain places like either my desk, my bed, or somewhere else. And I have to do something my reading is paused and I leave off somewhere in the book only for it to be continued later on when I pick it up again. I think Laurie Simmons and Peter Wheelwright statement of this project Kaleidoscope House is the representation of a mundane and domesticity of home and family life style through a child’s perspective view and thinking. The compositional elements used to convey and emphasize the meaning of the photo using color, light, contrast, and perspective. The perspective being that of a child by using the dollhouse as the main theme of a home and family life style.
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