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Tiny Furniture’s photographer Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmons
Encore spotlight’s Tiny Furniture‘s photographer Laurie Simmons, who plays the fictional mother of Aura, in Lena Dunham’s new film.
Laurie Simmons was born in Long Island, New York, in 1949. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 1971.
Ms. Simmons was a young art school graduate in New York hoping to support herself as a freelance commercial photographer. Aiming to get a job illustrating a toy company catalog, she photographed dollhouse furniture. She didn’t get the assignment, but she found a vision.
“..Setting up small rooms with dolls in them was a way for me to experience photography without taking my camera out to the street. I felt that I could set up my own world right around me, without ever having to leave the studio,” she says in a 2000 interview.
• In 2001, Simmons designed, with the architect Peter Wheelwright, an interactive modernist dollhouse called the Kaleidoscope House. The house was decorated with miniature artwork and furniture by contemporary artists and designers.
• Also in 2001, Simmons began her Instant Decorator series, which was based on a 1976 interior decorating book of the same name, that provided templates of household rooms for the client to fill with swatches of fabric and paint samples. The series features works that are collage-like and opulently filled with accessories and characters in dramatic mises en scène.
• In 2006 Simmons made her first film The Music of Regret, a mini musical in three acts which premiered at MoMA . The film extends her photographic practice to performance, incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep.
Tiny Furniture shows here and here.
More on Laurie Simmons here.