the luminous playhouse
The Luminous Playhouse Theater Company is an ongoing project for my photographic explorations of visual narrative, the power of implied theater, and the theater of implication.
The Luminous stage is a 1960s abstract-modern dollhouse with modular sections of colorful translucent plastic. Sets and characters are intentionally mismatched in style and scale: new, handmade, found-object, and vintage with mysterious histories—all of them collected for their storytelling potential. Since I began the project in 2005 I’ve been continually experimenting with staging and scale, light, and artifice and abstraction to create an evocative theatrical interior-scape.
There’s a fascination with the power of the camera to reveal an intense human world in dollhouses and miniatures—from Laurie Simmon’s 1970s ironic feminist dollhouse scenes to the elaborate tiny fantasies of Martin and Muñoz.
The Luminous Playhouse invites very personal interpretations, requiring viewers to supply their own stories the way children make up narratives when they play with dollhouse toys. The drama unfolds at the edges where memory and childhood fantasy encounter grown-up disillusionment and alienation, and our tenacious longing for order, beauty, and connection.
—Anne Garland
This blog highlights current Luminous Playhouse photos and some favorite older images; I’ve also previously 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.
