Walking Gun

Laurie Simmons American

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.

Walking Gun, Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949), Gelatin silver print

This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.

Open Access

As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.

API

Public domain data for this object can also be accessed using the Met's Open Access API.