Laurie Simmons: Photographs 1978/79 - Tapa dura

In a 1992 interview, Laurie Simmons stated that, in her first body of color works, she was "trying to recreate a feeling, a mood from the time I was growing up: a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time." Reproduced here, her early series Interiors and Big Figures depict a post-World War II, 50s suburbia through plastic housewife and cowboy dolls placed in constructed interiors and manipulated exteriors. While the dolls provide a sense of play, the reality of the images they model is unavoidable. The female is pictured in the home, but she is alone, isolated, and vulnerable. The cowboy exudes the confidence and independence of a life of adventure, but he cannot escape the implied violence, racism and paternalism that also characterize his ideal.