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ILES: So tell me about "Walking Camera
(Jimmy the Camera II),"
which you made in 1987.
How did you come to make
this particular work?
SIMMONS: Well, I'd spent
a couple of years shooting
at a ventriloquist museum in Kentucky.
I was working very closely
with a ventriloquist named Doug Skinner,
and one day I was
at Doug Skinner's apartment,
and I looked on the wall
and there was a picture
of a matzo box on legs.
And I had a kind of recovered memory
of seeing the Chesterfield
cigarette boxes dancing on TV
when I was really tiny,
almost pre-memory.
And it kind of jogged
a whole new train of thought.
Ventriloquists are investing a personality
into this inanimate object.
And here I saw this matzo box,
which then translated
into a package of cigarettes,
and thought about the unwieldiness
of that physical object on legs.
Shortly after that, I happened to see
the movie "The Wiz."
There was a camera
walking around in the background,
an incredible prop of a camera,
and it occurred to me
that I had to get that camera,
and I had to shoot it
on somebody's legs in it.
That was the beginning
of this whole train of thought.
And it really was obvious to me
that my friend and mentor
Jimmy De Sana had to wear the prop,
because not only had he taught me
everything I knew about photography
and was a really close friend,
but also he had been
diagnosed with AIDS,
and I think it was unspoken between us,
but we both knew that there wasn't
that much time left.
I mean, we hoped
that there was time left, he and I,
but kind of knew that there wasn't,
and it seemed like
we both got the message that it would be
sort of a funny and touching
and significant tribute to him.
I just sort of let him
move around in the camera--
I shot it with a 35 millimeter Nikon--
and as he would kind of bend
and move around, I let him move with it,
I just kept shooting,
and then in the end I edited the shots
that I thought felt the most animated,
or felt the most like him, actually.
ILES: So this, on a certain level,
is a portrait of Jimmy?
SIMMONS: It's a portrait
on the most primary level.
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