1979

New Bathroom / Woman Standing

American, born 1949

In the mid-1970s, Laurie Simmons purchased an assortment of 1950s dollhouse furniture from a toy store and brought it into her studio. After putting dolls and furniture together into make-believe scenes, she photographed her new miniature worlds. These scenes came from both Simmons’s imagination and her memories, though not necessarily from moments in her own life. In this picture, she tells the story of a typical 1960s housewife, which to her, a working female photographer in the 1970s, “seemed sweet and terrifying and abstract and whitewashed.” By using dolls and toy furniture instead of human actors, Simmons invites us into a childhood world of fantasy and play, where we might create our own stories about the imaginary scene she assembled.