Laurie Simmons’ daughter, Lena Dunham, has recently been thrown into the spotlight with the success of her new HBO series, Girls, but Simmons herself has been a well-known New York photographer for over 30 years. Both women seem to enjoy blurring fact and fiction, with viewers of Simmons’ work wondering if what they’re seeing is real or simulated, and viewers of Girls questioning how much of the show is from Dunham’s own biography.
Much of Simmons’ work has involved shooting small figurines in dollhouse scenes meant to resemble, or at least comment on, real life. Simmons says the work was originally designed as a way to challenge the perception that photography always tells the truth.
“My concern was to tell the most realistic lie I could,” she says.
As for Dunham, she takes her mother’s notion of a “realistic lie” and runs with it in her own work. The title of Dunham’s first feature-length movie, Tiny Furniture, which she both wrote and starred in, was inspired by Simmons’ dollhouse photography. In it, Dunham plays a character, Aura, who is a recent college grad living at home and trying to make it as a writer in New York, all of which was true of Dunham at the time. Upping the reality stakes, Dunham casted Simmons as Aura’s mom (who is a photographer) and her real life sister as Aura’s sister in the movie. The film is even shot in the family’s actual apartment in New York.
In the movie Simmons plays a cold and severe mom, which she says is not the case in real life.
“That wasn’t me,” Simmons says. “Those were just lines that Siri [the character] read.”
The biggest difference between the movie and the real world, says Simmons, is that unlike the movie where it is just a house full of women, their family also includes a dad — the painter Carroll Dunham.
“The really huge difference is that there is a very present father, a very involved father,” says Simmons. “The house is also a lot messier and there is a dog.”
Girls takes a different angle on the struggling-writer-in-New-York theme, but still makes one wonder about how much the real-life Dunham represents Hannah, the character she plays on the show. The most surprisingly true parallel to Tiny Furniture is that, like in the movie, Dunham, 26, lived at home up until a couple of weeks ago. Even though she is a growing television star she just recently found her own place in Brooklyn.
“I think it’s time, but I would have never complained [about her living at home],” says Simmons. “I really am crazy about her.”
Simmons’ most recent body of work uses a life-size Japanese sex doll as her newest model. Instead of dollhouses, Simmons has been photographing this figure in the real world and the work inches even closer to that line between true and false she’s been skirting for years.
“I realized that I could take this doll and put it into the landscape and suddenly I was on scale with everything else,” Simmons says. “It was like the entire rest of the world got unlocked. After 25 years or whatever it was of shooting on table tops it was a dream come true.”
The series, which is called The Love Doll, blurs the line so closely that Simmons says a crowd of visitors at the work’s first opening in Paris believed the doll in the photos was a real person.
“I’ve taken this to a really different place and people were quite confused,” she says.
While Dunham’s writing is gaining mainstream attention, Simmons’ work has had a far-reaching impact mostly in the world of art and photography. Barbara DeGenevieve, the chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says she has long admired Simmons’ work both for the way it’s examined gender but also in the way that it’s been so consistent over the years. By using dolls as her subject throughout her career, DeGenevieve says that Simmons in many ways created a unique niche that could never be filled any other way.
“She was a revelation because she was able to do with dolls these things that might in some ways would have been cliché if she worked with real people,” DeGenevieve says. “That’s what’s nice about working with inanimate objects, you can make them do things that are metaphorical and symbolic, things that you would never ask a human to do.”
DeGenevieve says she’s also fascinated with the dynamic between Simmons and Dunham and credits Simmons for helping her daughter build a successful career. Growing up around a photographer and a painter exposed Dunham to two people who were willing to struggle and prioritize their work and she also saw the ebb and flow of the art world.
“You have to take a lot of shit as an artist, and you can’t really hide it from the kids when things aren’t going well,” Simmons says. “This show didn’t sell so therefore you can’t go to camp. [Lena] understood that there are peaks and valleys.”
That’s been useful because while receiving a fair amount of praise from some, Dunham’s show Girls has also been criticized by others. Some critics have called it out for having an air of privilege because it’s about a group of fairly well-to-do young white women. Mostly, however, the show has garnered a lot of attention for Dunham’s unique way of filming and thinking about sex, body image and female sexuality.
Dunhman, who is not as skinny as your cliché Hollywood actress, is not afraid to put her body out there, nor is she afraid to tackle the weird intimacies of what happens in the bedroom between consenting partners.
“It certainly hasn’t emerged quietly,” Simmons says.
Simmons admits to keeping tabs on her daughter’s reviews — she has a Google alert set up — but says she’s not worried about Dunham’s ability to handle the pressure.
“Lena has a really healthy body image and healthy sense of who she is and I’m really proud of that as a mother,” Simmons says. “You don’t have to be a Hollywood starlet to express yourself.”
