" title="The Luminous Playhouse Theater Company"> The Luminous Playhouse Theater Company

The Luminous Playhouse Theater Company is a photography project/practice for my explorations of visual narrative, the power of implied theater, and the theater of implication.

The stage is a 1960s abstract-modern dollhouse with modular sections of colorful translucent plastic, in which I construct illuminated scenes with miniature figures and props. My sets and cast of characters are intentionally mismatched in style and scale—new, handmade, found-object, and vintage with mysterious histories—and all carefully chosen for their storytelling potential.

I began the Luminous Playhouse in 2005 and add to it daily. I’m continually experimenting with staging and scale, light and shadow and reflection, blur and depth of field, and abstraction and realism and artifice, to create an evocative theatrical or cinematic interior-scape. The camera reveals a surprisingly intense human world in these artificial figures and scenes, and the images inspire very personal interpretations—inviting viewers to supply their own stories the way children make up narratives when they play with dollhouse toys.

The resulting dreamlike drama of the Luminous Playhouse unfolds at the edges of memories of childhood fantasy and grown-up feelings of longing and disillusionment, alienation and connection.

This blog highlights my current Luminous Playhouse photos and some favorite older images; I have also posted daily Luminous Playhouse experiments on Flickr. You can contact me at anne [at] luminousplayhouse [dot] com, or use this form. My design website is www.annegarland.com.

—Anne Garland