As an undergraduate, I studied literature and theater, discovering photography late in my education. I earned my B.A. in English at Oberlin College, an MFA in Visual Art from Rutgers University and attended the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program. I brought an interest in narrative to my early work, exploring surrogate forms of domestic space like dollhouses (Domestic Interiors, 1996), period rooms (Well-Appointed, 1999), and hotel rooms (Complimentary, 2002). After living in Brooklyn for sixteen years, I accepted a teaching appointment at Ohio University in 2004 where I taught for sixteen years. While there, I produced several projects that took as their point of departure the history of spirit photography including Asylum (2005), Ectoplasm (2005), and Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2009).
My first book, Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), tells the story of my child’s adoption through the prism of nineteenth-century hidden mother photographs. The term “hidden mother” refers to the widespread but little-known practice in 19th century portrait photography of concealing a mother’s body as she supported and calmed her child during the lengthy exposures demanded by early photographic technology. In the final portrait of the child, the mother—often covered from head-to-toe in a black drop cloth—appears as an uncanny figure. A practical strategy deployed by the photographer unintentionally yielded an evocative representation of the mother; never meant to be seen, her presence nonetheless haunts these images. Hidden Mother enlists these strange and powerful images to present a poetic account of becoming a mother through adoption. The book was shortlisted for the Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Prize. Regarding the book’s nomination, Joel Smith writes, “In the tradition of meditations on photography, I would put it on the shelf beside Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.” In addition, I organized a companion exhibition—the first to be devoted to this vernacular subject to be presented in the U.S.—which traveled from 2014-16 to Blue Sky Gallery, Palmer Museum of Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, and Kennedy Museum of Art.
My second book, City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy Books, 2022), continues my research into 19th century vernacular uses of photography. The project pictures the complex lives of the 19th century women, diagnosed as suffering from hysteria, who were hospitalized at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Incorporating archival medical photographs with my own photographs and texts, City of Incurable Women springs these women from their institutional moorings, inventing fugitive stories that unravel the “answer” of diagnosis and the implications for a critically engaged documentary poetics.
From 2002-2019, my work was represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York where I presented four one-person exhibitions including Complimentary (2002), Apparition (2005), and Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2009). In 2014, the gallery organized a mid-career retrospective exhibition of my print work, Laura Larson: Photographs 1996-2012. In a laudatory review published in Hyperallergic, Susan Silas writes that the exhibition opens “a critical commentary that evolves over the course of the artist’s career on what photography is and what it does and how it does it.” I have exhibited my work widely including Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Wexner Center for the Arts and my exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and TimeOut New York. My work is held in the collections of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Microsoft, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New York Public Library, and Whitney Museum of American Art.