Laura Larson

 A guiding question in Laura Larson’s practice is how to reckon with histories of oppression while imagining new visual forms of freedom. City of Incurable Women reimagines the complex lives of the 19^th century women, diagnosed as suffering from hysteria, who were hospitalized, and extensively photographed, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Looking between the documented images and imagined experiences of these women, the project explores a potential history of the women’s relationships with each other and to picture what often eludes representation: suffering, defiance, desire. This was a way to think outside of the power dynamics that positioned the women as scientific objects of inquiry and subjects to control. Embracing photography’s capacity to feel, City of Incurable Women sees these women as unruly spirits that haunt the present, mining the radical possibilities of resistance.

Laura Larson (b.1965, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a photographer and writer based in Columbus, OH. Mining the intersection between documentary and lyrical concerns, her work looks to photography’s histories to tell personal and sociocultural stories about women’s experiences. She’s exhibited her work extensively, at such venues as Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, The Getty Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work is held in the collections of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the author of two books: Hidden Mother (2017), which was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photo Book Prize, and City of Incurable Women (2022). She is currently at work on a collaborative book project, All the Women I Know, with writer Christine Hume. In 2023, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.