Artist, Laurie Simmons: I shot The Doll House Interiors in 1978. Setting up small rooms with dolls in them was a way for me to experience photography without taking my camera out to the street.
They're rooms from doll houses that are leaned against things and set up on an angle. The back of the set would be toothpicks and scotch tape and little sticks and things holding the rooms together in a very temporary way, and it's only when I go in with the camera that I can turn them into real spaces.
I would set up these interiors and then shoot them at different times during the day as the light changed. By moving around the figures, I was, in fact, animating them, even though I was taking still photographs. I like the way, in that kitchen, it's always five after six. It's always the dinner hour.
Scale wasn't an issue to me. If the loaf of bread was half the size of the woman herself, that wasn't a problem. That seemed like it gave it a kind of magic. The chairs, the food, the stove, the sink, the woman. I like the way they all occupy the same importance in the picture.
The space seems so claustrophobic—I can't imagine putting more than one doll in it. Every inch of the space has something going on, whether it's a color or an object, or air that you can taste and feel.
I see these pictures as being a little lonely, like “where is the rest of the world, where are the other people, where's the rest of the family?” It's interesting for me that a picture can be so colorful and so bright and so vivacious and so lonely at the same time.