Photographs 1978/79

Laurie Simmons: Photographs 1978/79, Interiors and The Big Figures is an exhibition catalogue published by Skarstedt Fine Art, New York, edited by Collier Schorr and Laurie Simmons. It gathers two early bodies of work: the staged dollhouse interiors and the freestanding costumed figures Simmons photographed at the start of her career.

Simmons built small domestic sets from dolls, dollhouse furniture and ventriloquist dummies. She photographed them as if they were full-scale rooms, using shallow depth of field and studio lighting to erase the scale that would give the illusion away. The Big Figures pictures share that same interest in artificial, costumed bodies, but move it out of the dollhouse and into life-size tableaux, staged figures standing in for the real people the interiors left conspicuously absent.

Simmons emerged in the late 1970s alongside Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth. All three used staged photography to question the truth-claims of the documentary image, and the dollhouse interiors gathered here remain the body of work most identified with Simmons's name. This catalogue and the Skarstedt show it accompanied brought that early material back into view after two decades in which her later work had drawn most of the attention.