Laurie Simmons Quotes

• Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible.

  Laurie Simmons

  Terrible, Really Great, Terrific

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• I'm not interested in telling a story in my photographic work. I'm more interested in freezing certain moments in time.

  Laurie Simmons

  Stories, Moments, Certain

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a male doll, and it always kind of implodes. Whenever I use men, they're so scary and so dark, and I can never find this sort of lightness or this place between doll and human that I find with female dolls.

  Laurie Simmons

  Dark, Men, Scary

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.

  Laurie Simmons

  Important, Stopping, Starting

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• The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a [doll's] face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes. Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them. That's something I really wanted to get out there right away.

  Laurie Simmons

  Moving, Thinking, Light

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

  Laurie Simmons

  Perfection, Kind

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 4, 2014.

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• I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.

  Laurie Simmons

  Mean, Kids, Thinking

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• People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.

  Laurie Simmons

  Lying, Believe, People

  Jan Howard, Laurie Simmons, Baltimore Museum of Art (1997). “Laurie Simmons: the music of regret”

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• My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say "housewife"? A home engineer.

  Laurie Simmons

  Mother, Father, Home

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think the big news there - most post-menopausal women I know are not celibate.

  Laurie Simmons

  Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.

  Laurie Simmons

  Past, Order, Know Yourself

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• I think making features has got to be in the addiction category.

  Laurie Simmons

  Thinking, Addiction, Categories

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• Oh god, success is so exhausting.

  Laurie Simmons

  Exhausting

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• I use people that are close to me, like a studio assistant or a friend, someone I know who's going to really enjoy it. It's important to me to have men inside there, too, because so many dollers are men. It's putting me into a pretty odd headspace, the shooting, because I understand the motivation of these dollers to dress up. There's a way that you start to prefer the reality of that world to your own world. It's so much more beautiful.

  Laurie Simmons

  Beautiful, Motivation, Reality

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I feel like I spent so much time trying to understand my identity and my identity as an artist. But when all is said and done, at this age, I feel the most like I felt when I was 11. And all those talents I had when I was 11 and 12 - I'm letting them sort of happen again. I can't speak for men, but for women - we go back to a kind of pre-adolescent state when we were superfree and supercool.

  Laurie Simmons

  Artist, Men, Age

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• ...Let's get to the image as quickly as possible, let's get to the message even faster, and let's find the scale to knock you over the head with the image and the message.

  Laurie Simmons

  Messages, Scales, Faster

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• I've always gone for a kind of perfection. In the end, it's so much better to get the feeling of, "Wow, she's so perfect," from a doll than to have to bear that from a woman in a magazine.

  Laurie Simmons

  Perfect, Perfection, Feelings

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I remember years ago hearing a gynecologist say, "Women report a great sense of calm and well-being post-menopause." This was way before I was even thinking about it, but I thought, "Hmm, that might be something to look forward to. A sense of well-being!"

  Laurie Simmons

  Thinking, Calm, Remember

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The thing that a lot of people may or may not know is every artist is a cinephile, whether they watch movies whether they're painting, or have films that influence them.

  Laurie Simmons

  Artist, People, Watches

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.

  Laurie Simmons

  Artist, Cameras, Turns

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

  Laurie Simmons

  Artist, World, Students

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

  Laurie Simmons

  Moving, Thinking, Challenges

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling, was, "Will I know when to give up? Will I know when I've suffered enough rejection? Will I know when to get out?"

  Laurie Simmons

  Giving Up, Struggle, Artist

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.

  Laurie Simmons

  Artist, Kind, Warhol

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I feel like I've finally got to this place that I really want to be. The place where, in my fantasy, the characters just get up and walk around - this interstitial place between humans and dolls. But I also feel like, where am I supposed to go from here? Because this feels like the place I've always wanted to be, for my whole life of shooting.

  Laurie Simmons

  Character, Fantasy, Whole Life

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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