Walking Gun

Artist:: Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949)

Date:: 1991

Medium:: Gelatin silver print

Dimensions:: Frame: 134.6 × 226.1 cm (53 × 89 in.)

Classification:: Photographs

Credit Line:: Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998

Accession Number:: 1998.440

Rights and Reproduction:: © Laurie Simmons

Not on view

In the early 1990s, Simmons created wickedly funny large-format photographs showing spotlit doll legs topped with various toy-objects: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. By aping the scale and impact of billboards and movie screens, Simmons turns the "directorial" mode of slick staging and lighting against itself, to reveal the spectacle of "woman-as-object" in contemporary culture. Sending up the old-movie trope of representing the man creeping in shadow carrying a gun, the artist offers instead the death-dealing seductress of film noir in miniature, a doll capable of killing its master at a moment's notice.

Inscription: Signed and dated in ink on label affixed to frame verso: "Laurie Simmons // 1991"

From the artist, via Metro Pictures.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Modern Photographs from the Collection V," June 4, 2002–December 29, 2002.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection," March 22, 2011–January 2, 2012.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Selects from the Met Collection," March 17–June 14, 2015.

Uklański, Piotr. Piotr Uklański: Fatal Attraction. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2015. p. 230.

Essays
The Pictures Generation

Timelines
The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present

Department

Photographs (35,820)

Artist / Maker / Culture

Laurie Simmons (8)

Object Type / Material

Gelatin silver prints (9,496)

Photographs (46,254)

Geographic Location

North and Central America (92,272)