Laurie Simmons
Autofiction: My Collaborator
December, 2025
Laurie Simmons’ latest body of work begins not with the camera but with a machine. An AI model, trained on five decades of her staged photographs, generated images that reimagined the artist’s photographic archive from text prompts written by Simmons herself. She then returned to these outputs, curating and hand-finishing each one to fold them back into her practice. The result is a series that is both recognisably hers and uncannily estranged: a machine’s reading of an artistic life.
The project continues the questions that have defined Simmons’ work since the late 1970s, when she emerged as part of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Richard Prince. From her earliest photographs, Simmons examined how mass-media images—from advertising, cinema, and photography—script memory, identity, and desire. Dolls, puppets, and real human subjects became her protagonists, revealing how the artificial often speaks more directly to the conditions of the real.
In Autofiction: My Collaborator, the non-human collaborator becomes the agent generating the initial image. The AI outputs are not mere pastiches but uncanny recombinations, in which Simmons’ signature motifs (surrogate models for self-portraits, constructed sets, bodies of water, theatrical mise-en-scène) shimmer at the edges of unfamiliar arrangements. This interplay between authorship and collaboration, memory and estrangement, past and future, runs throughout the works, both individually and as a collective.
Where the Pictures Generation once asked how images circulate in mass media, Simmons now extends that inquiry into the algorithmic age. What happens when an artist’s legacy becomes a dataset, when images are parsed and recomposed by a system that does not see, remember, or desire, yet is reabsorbed into the artist’s ongoing practice?
Simmons’ first foray into AI was presented at the YoungArts Museum in Miami (2023), with original works printed on silk and linen and embellished by hand with paint and embroidery thread. This new series is more forensic: fifty works that distill her practice through the logic of the machine. For Simmons, who has long embraced collaboration—whether with performers, objects, fellow artists, or her creative family—this dialogue with AI is both radical and consistent. It suggests that creativity is not diminished but made more complex when authorship is shared, and that the meaning of images remains in flux, evolving with the technologies and cultural systems that define their moment.
Bio
Laurie Simmons is an internationally recognized artist. Since the mid-70s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera to create images with intensely psychological subtexts and nonlinear narratives. By the early 1980s Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of photography began a new dialogue in contemporary art.