"LAURIE SIMMONS: WALKING, TALKING, LYING". Collectif. Editions Aperture Foundation, New York. 2005. Imprimé en Italie. Petit in-4, couverture toilée rouge photo. 156 pages. Texte en anglais "Reflections on a Mirror" de Kate Linker illustré de 96 reproductions photographiques noir & blanc et couleurs, pleine page pour la plupart, par Laurie Simmons. 

 

"Laurie Simmons is one of the first contemporary American photographers to create elaborately staged narrative photographs. Using dolls to act out piquant scenarios within specially constructed environments, she has slyly commented on contemporary culture while recapturing a sense of her childhood in an era she recalls as "both beautiful and lethal." Populated by housewives, ventriloquists' dummies, and familiar objects in unfamiliar guises, her diverse tableaux are often infused with bittersweet nostalgia yet charged with a disquieting sense of dislocation. In Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying, Kate Linker concentrates on selected series to illuminate ideas that cut through the artist' entire body of work. Of particular interest are the willfully ambiguous interplay between objects, figures, and backgrounds, and the way specific things (toys, cakes, guns) and setting (suburban interiors in particular) take on strange powers in Simmon's images. As Linker makes clear, the artist's use of narrative links her to a number of contemporary fiction writers, while her exploration of artifice, advertising, childhood memory, and unabashed eclecticism has been a vital factor in postwar photography."

 

Ref LPB1107