Laurie Simmons

I’ve always considered myself

an artist who uses photography,

an artist who uses a camera.

I’m pretty sure that’s because

I walked out of my photo class in art school

and I feel like, because I never had a formal education,

I’m always reluctant to call myself a photographer.

While I’m very proud of the fact that I work photographically

and am self-taught in that way,

I still feel like “artist with a camera.”

I think until I used Big Camera/Little Camera for my exhibition,

I think I wasn’t aware of how many layers

that photo actually has for me.

Starting with being some sort of self-portrait

of my father and myself,

because it’s his camera, the camera he gave me

and then my little toy camera

and then everything that I’ve ever done that

involves disparity of scale is in that photo

and all my ambivalence about being a photographer

is in that photo at the same time that

all my respect for the tools is there as well.

Identity—an American identity—

was such an important part of the way I grew up

because the identity I grew up with was so contrived and

created to plant my family firmly

in the center of the United States, their new country.

Who you were and how you looked

and whether you were male or female, a boy or a girl,

these things were so strict.

So, of course, as I grew up and I moved away from home

and the idea that a boy and a girl wouldn’t be together,

but a boy and a boy would be together

and I imagined a girl doll and a girl doll together.

Identity started becoming more fluid

and, of course, we live in a time now

when the aspirations are to have gender be more fluid.

The first pictures I made were about trying to reconstruct a memory

and talk about the nature of artifice,

talk about both the beauty, the light side and the dark side,

of what I understood to be happening around me when I was a child.

My house looked like the dollhouse.

The dollhouse looked like my house.

My kitchen looked like the kitchen in Life magazine,

or did the kitchen in Life magazine look like my kitchen?

I started collecting all of this furniture and making these spaces.

I was most inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark,

his activity of cutting an abandoned building in half.

Of course, he was an activist.

He was an incredible artist.

And I saw the black-and-white works that documented

the interiors that he literally bifurcated

and I thought, “I want my pictures to look like that.”

So I started constructing rooms.

I used walls. I put tables and chairs . . .

[I'd] play with the scale and the space

and shoot from angles that would make you dizzy or nauseate you.

The back of my sets were like smoke and mirrors,

tape and toothpicks, and the fronts were like walls that

were sort of crooked and falling

and furniture that was slightly out of scale.

So it felt very much like a collage or even like a movie set.

So it was like a very kind of active engagement with this set.

I always had a sense when I was shooting my still photographs

that I was a pretend film director,

so I would jump all around with the camera,

do things that made it feel like my characters were animated though they were very still. They were inanimate objects.

But I wanted, through my camera work,

to make it feel like they had a life outside the photograph.

The reason I wanted to make my first film

was that I wanted to create a three-act musical

where I said goodbye to twenty-some odd years of work

and could start over.

So shooting a movie

and having that kind of focus on actors and faces,

I felt that I could embrace portraiture,

or return to a kind of portraiture, because the first pictures I ever took actually, privately,

were pictures of my friends.

I constantly return to the human figure

trying to find a way to make it my work.

Shooting underwater, certainly, working with models swimming,

I felt like there was a kind of screen

between me and the human figure that could make it okay.

Portraiture is really something

I never believed that I could . . . do.

But somehow, with the idea that I could interrupt

the character in some way,

paint on eyes . . .

in the case of Cyrus Grace,

paint an entire suit over a naked body.

Somehow, I found a way to get to portraiture

and kind of make it my own.

My work changes physically and formally,

black and white to color, large to small, human to surrogate.

So if the last series was black and white

and it was really huge,

I think it’s time to come in and focus and get really colorful.

Or working with humans, shooting them under water,

they were noisy and annoying,

it’s time to get back to a doll.

Drop one single doll into a pool.

Shoot it in black and white.

So I think a lot of the moves that I make are about

keeping myself interested in my own work

because sometimes I think I’m really like a dog with a bone,

that my subject has literally been the same

from the first day in 1976 that I picked up a camera

and shot a little sink in front of a piece of ivy wallpaper.

I’m still shooting the same thing somehow.

It’s a figure in an interior space

and if the interior space is actually outside,

I’m talking about the interior space of my mind.