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Walking Camera I (Jimmy the Camera),
1987.
Black and white photograph, 84 x 48 inches.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Ruth Baum, Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Shirley Fiterman, Nicki Harris, Dakis Joannou.
2003.80.
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In the late 1970s, Laurie Simmons (b. 1949, Far Rockaway, New York), along with artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman, began to recognize photography's potential as a means to critique mass-media representations of women. Drawing on childhood memories of mothers—both her own and those she saw on television in the 1950s—Simmons started making photographs of staged tableaux of miniature female figures posed inside dollhouses. Her "Interiors" present close-up views of the isolation and objectification of the ideal housewife, a figure as fabricated as any mass-produced doll. These works were followed by related photographic series throughout the 1980s depicting such objects as toy ballerinas, tiny cowboys, ventriloquists, and what the artist calls "Walking Objects," like Jimmy the Camera (1987). Inspired by the dancing cigarette packages she saw in television commercials, Simmons's giant camera is in fact a film prop worn by her friend, photographer Jimmy De Sana, who taught Simmons how to develop film when she was new to the medium. This animated, mobile camera is a tribute to De Sana, who died in 1990, as well as a witty metaphor for the omnipresence of photography in our culture.
Meghan Dailey
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