Laurie Simmons: I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a m...

I'm not interested in telling a story in my photographic work. I'm more interested in freezing certain moments in time.

Laurie Simmons

certain moments stories

Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible.

Laurie Simmons

terrific really-great terrible

I feel like I spent so much time trying to understand my identity and my identity as an artist. But when all is said and done, at this age, I feel the most like I felt when I was 11. And all those talents I had when I was 11 and 12 - I'm letting them sort of happen again. I can't speak for men, but for women - we go back to a kind of pre-adolescent state when we were superfree and supercool.

Laurie Simmons

artist age men

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a [doll's] face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes. Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them. That's something I really wanted to get out there right away.

Laurie Simmons

light moving thinking

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.

Laurie Simmons

mean kids thinking

...Let's get to the image as quickly as possible, let's get to the message even faster, and let's find the scale to knock you over the head with the image and the message.

Laurie Simmons

scales faster messages

I think I'm still, in many ways, a terribly self-conscious person. I'd probably be shooting and think, "Well, how does my hair look?"

Laurie Simmons

thinking

People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.

Laurie Simmons

believe lying people

I was aware that people thought a certain type of photo work was either stealing, borrowing, copying or dumb.

Laurie Simmons

copying dumb people

I think of scientific veracity as an idea from the past - the scientists say it is so, the photo is proof. Even the authoritative power of the word actual - an actual what? An actual retouched photo, an actual collaged photo?

Laurie Simmons

past ideas thinking

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

Laurie Simmons

dumb artist thinking

I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.

Laurie Simmons

stopping starting important

I've always gone for a kind of perfection. In the end, it's so much better to get the feeling of, "Wow, she's so perfect," from a doll than to have to bear that from a woman in a magazine.

Laurie Simmons

perfection perfect feelings

I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

Laurie Simmons

kind perfection

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

Laurie Simmons

challenges moving thinking

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

Laurie Simmons

artist students world

The visual world has blown up, the world of writing has blown up; there's so much text online. Anyone and everyone can express themselves. It's a lot to think about as an artist. Also, that the persona of the artist might actually be of some importance. When I came of age, it was important to be quiet and hang back and be mysterious. I knew artists who didn't even want to show up at their own openings. They never wanted to have their picture taken, didn't want to autograph a book, didn't want to answer a question. I came of age in a world where it was "Let the work speak for itself."

Laurie Simmons

taken writing book

When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.

Laurie Simmons

warhol kind artist

I use people that are close to me, like a studio assistant or a friend, someone I know who's going to really enjoy it. It's important to me to have men inside there, too, because so many dollers are men. It's putting me into a pretty odd headspace, the shooting, because I understand the motivation of these dollers to dress up. There's a way that you start to prefer the reality of that world to your own world. It's so much more beautiful.

Laurie Simmons

motivation beautiful reality

The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling, was, "Will I know when to give up? Will I know when I've suffered enough rejection? Will I know when to get out?"

Laurie Simmons

giving-up artist struggle

I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a male doll, and it always kind of implodes. Whenever I use men, they're so scary and so dark, and I can never find this sort of lightness or this place between doll and human that I find with female dolls.