City of Incurable Women 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 a broad range of materials, Larson layers archival imagery with her own photographs and texts, speculating through the documented accounts of the women’s illness. Larson imagines the women as a collective, making a claim for their shared knowledge and the pleasures and risks of escape. 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 empathy and resistance.
Available through Saint Lucy Books.