Laurie Simmons @ Amanda Wilkinson Gallery

Laurie Simmons is one of the most significant artists of the past forty years and a pioneer of the critique of photographic imagery associated with the ‘Pictures Generation’ of the late 1970s and early ’80s in New York.
In 2017 – the post-internet age of fake news, fabricated images and fictive identites – and Simmons’s ‘Fake Fashion’ photographs add to their still uncanny presence an equally uncanny prescience. While the ‘Fake Fashion’ photographs heralded, in the first instance, the manipulated imagery that would shortly inundate fashion publications, the more crucial questions they raised more than thirty years ago also anticipate the problematic prevalence of ‘the fake’ in so many aspects of contemporary culture.