Nineteenth Century Photography Now at The J. Paul Getty Museum, April 9-July 7

Selections from City of Incurable Women will be included in Nineteenth Century Photography Now, opening on April 9th at the Getty.

The earliest photographs—often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images—may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organized around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.

"All the Women I Know" featured in The Hopkins Review, 17.1 (Winter 2024)

Locating a Collective Lyric “I”, a special folio guest edited by Leila Eisa & Jennifer Stager

In this folio, we are joined by other writers, scholars, and artists who also ask what possibilities and frictions emerge from an exploration of a plural “I.”  

In dreams I walk with you exhibition at Silver Eye Center for Photography

In dreams I walk with you features photographs inspired directly by the themes of six recent virtual workshops. All were led by artists nationally known for their original uses of photography as an expressive medium. This exhibition by teaching artists and participants meditates on artistic process and how mutual support can empower personal expression.

EXCITING NEWS!

I’ve been named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. Many thanks to the Foundation for this tremendous support of my work.

Lecture at Lesley University, October 20th at Noon

Society of Photographic Education Conference Midwest Chapter

I’ll be talking about City of Incurable Women at the Midwest Chapter Conference of Society of Photographic Education in Cincinnati on Friday, October 7th at 11 AM.

Hyperallergic review of City of Incurable Women

'Radical Empathy' in City of Incurable Women: A Conversation with Laura Larson

I spoke with Renee Shea about City of Incurable Women in the September/October issue of World Literature Today.

In City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy Books, 2022), Laura Larson continues her study of nineteenth-century photography, this time through responses to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, founded in 1656. She focuses on the late 1800s when Jean-Martin Charcot, then director of the hospital, photographed women diagnosed with hysteria. In her book of visual and written texts, Larson explores the depiction of four patients in the hospital (Blanche, Genevieve, Augustine, and Jane) as she reimagines them through the perspective of a contemporary political climate that seeks to control women’s bodies—and resistance to that climate. “I want a liquid chronicle of La Salpêtrière,” she writes, “a volatile flow of chemistry detonating then and now.” Her reflections interrogate the limitations and possibilities of photography as objective documentation, memory, and witness.

Lenscratch feature on City of Incurable Women, July 8

Laura Larson reimagines the female patients of the infamous Parisian hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière

I spoke with Alex Merola about City of Incurable Women for British Journal of Photography.

New Workshops Launched!

I’m offering two new workshops starting in May: Light & Ink, a six-week workshop on photography and writing and Projects, an intensive course for the development of new work that alternates one-on-one meetings with group critiques. See workshops tab for more information.

City of Incurable Women Available for Pre-Order

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.

The Hidden Mothers of Family Photographs/New Yorker

Hidden Mother discussed by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker:

In the Victorian era, mothers weren’t exactly doing it for the ’gram, but they still had to work for the photographs they wanted. The long exposures required by old-school cameras meant that young children needed to be kept still for considerable periods of time. Studio photographers enlisted mothers as literal supports, camouflaging them in sheets and drapes so that they could prop up their offspring inconspicuously. Alternatively, a photographer might scratch out a mother’s face in postproduction or blot it out with black paint.

The photographer and scholar Laura Larson collects many of these images in Hidden Mother, a haunting book from 2017 that mixes monograph and memoir. (She became interested in the subject during the process of adopting a child.) “The hidden mother appears in many forms, playing a structural but visually peripheral role in these portraits,” she writes. “Her form becomes indistinguishable from the appointment of the scene.” The mothers are uncanny, even darkly comic. They bring to mind vestals, or ghosts in a low-budget horror movie. They are human furniture, upholstered in black alpaca or a taffeta check. In one memorable image, a baby in a white diaper reclines on what appears to be a floral-print chair. A disembodied hand, fingers poised in supple anticipation, emerges from the left armrest. Describing such scenes, Larson writes:

A tattersall tablecloth, now embroidered; a flowered scarf; a striped blanket; a brocade drape (leaf, twig, vine, coralene); a calico curtain; a crocheted shawl; a velvet swathe.

She smells his hair.
She sees through the lace.
Her body’s uncomfortable, a little impatient, listening for the click of the lens closing.

The first edition is close to sold out! Order your copy here.

Hidden m(Other)s: A Conversation with Artists Emilio Rojas and Laura Larson

October 16, 2021, 3:00 pm

Hyperallergic review of shelf documents

Two Books Rethink Publishing as a Radical Practice

All the Women I Know in Seneca Review

Lost & Found: Autobiography and the Found Photograph

Lost & Found will explore the use of appropriated photographs as the basis for making autobiographical projects. Over 6 weeks, participants will be exposed to a diverse range of approaches and discover how working with found material—photographs not authored by the artist—can be a well of inspiration to write personal stories. Topics will include strategies for sourcing photographs, editing, and sequencing. Through readings and image presentations, the workshop will study historical and contemporary works including books, prints, and installations. These discussions will feed assignments that will weave images with text to harness the potential of these materials to evoke, describe, and narrate. Students will create an autobiographical work during the course of the workshop. Click on photo for more information and registration info.

shelf documents: art library as practice

I contributed an introductory essay and a selection of images from All the Women I Know to Heide Hinrich’s marvelous shelf documents, edited with Jo-ey Tang and Elizabeth Haines. The project assembles artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians to reflect on the art library as a generative resource and site for all who identify as queer, as women, as Black, as Indigenous, as people of colour.

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I lived in Brooklyn from 1988-2004, and in times of transition or deprivation, the many branches of the New York Public Library served as my adjunct studio. I loved working at its flagship location on 42nd Street. I could read and write and sketch. The Midtown Manhattan branch across the street holds a picture library—pages culled from deaccessioned books—that supplied images for my journals and zines. I didn’t have funds to pay studio rent but I could still make art in fellowship with other workers, whatever their pursuits. The library provided a form of refuge that resonated with my needs and sensibilities as an artist. Solitude is an essential element of artistic practice, but I rebel against the fantasy of the artist toiling in isolation from the world, this ideological freight of a conservatory model of art education. In the library, you are always reminded that your work is tethered to the social.

I carried my attachment to the library as studio into my teaching at Ohio University. When I bring studio art classes to the library, I ask students: if we think of the library as a repository of knowledge, what does our library know? Why is this book in the collection and not another? I want them to understand the hierarchical nature of the space so that they can find the information they need but also understand the political costs of access, how this determines what’s on the shelf. Choice is bound up in privilege and it’s instructive to understand how institutional accessibility is determined by this calculus. As an antidote, I emphasize the potentials of chance in research. I want students to see the radical possibilities of the chance encounter and how these moments open up lateral fields of disruption and connection. Grab a volume because you like the color of the binding. Check out a novel that your crush is reading. Serendipity and desire as search engine rooted in the experience of the subjective body.

For a foundations course in studio concepts, I assign a project where the students produce a site-specific work in the university’s library. I encourage the students to use the resources at hand when responding to the site rather than introducing conventional art materials. In a haunting performance, Nick, a graphic design student, directed his peers to wander the stacks. At his cue, everyone stopped and grabbed a book from the shelf. Each student was then asked to begin reading aloud from their book in a whisper while slowly walking up and down the aisles. The participants had to balance several states at once—quiet recitation while pacing, calibrating the route of their bodies and the volume of their voices in accordance with the group. They hummed—absorbed in their sentient experience and attuned to the collective.

second shelf begins with the inescapable fact that women, queer, and BIPOC artists are systemically excluded from the institutions that shape the art world: schools, archives, publishing, granting foundations, non-profit and commercial venues. It’s disheartening if familiar news that underrepresentation will remain a battle for liberatory practices. At its heart, Heide Hinrichs’s collaborative project extends beyond the necessary act of corrective and pivots towards the radical possibilities that are governed by chance. Like all hierarchical structures, the library is a vulnerable site, ready to be pierced, dismantled, and rebuilt. I imagine a student encountering this collection of works. Does it feel like a gift? A secret society? How can the experience of disorientation open up new paths of inquiry? second shelf speaks to the pleasures of promiscuous discovery and the transformative power of communion in the library.

In Focus: Girlhood in American Book Review

I reviewed Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures for the Girlhood issue of American Book Review (January/February 2021) edited by Christine Hume and Christina Milletti. My photograph, Gadisse, from All the Women I Know is on the cover.

The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that much was clear.

Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures gathers for the first time her photographs of girl gangs roving the American landscape, produced between 1997-2002. The pictures holler—let’s get out of Dodge!—as her protagonists skip town, get lost, and make do. Kurland sought her teenage collaborators on the fly and the improvisational aspect of the pictures is keenly felt. This spirit distinguishes the work from the archly cinematic ethos of the 1990s including the work of her teachers Gregory Crewdson and Philip Lorca diCorcia. She began the project as a graduate student in the Northeast and the book charts the development of the work as she traveled west. Her egalitarian gaze sweeps through American cultural landscapes, mapping city streets, industrial wastelands, the in-between spaces of highways and developments, thick forests, yawning deserts, and Pacific shores. The skies open up and they disappear. Her kinship with 19th century landscape photography is evident in the unapologetic awe of her settings and her travels run parallel to the runaway force of her protagonists’ adventures as they traverse these freighted vistas. A feminist trick mirror, Kurland’s road trip hijacks the archetypal journey of American westward expansion.

Within these tableaux, Kurland sets her protagonists loose, unleashing an emotional immediacy more often associated with the handheld camera. In Broadway (Joy) (2001), the camera is angled down on two girls as they dance on an empty desert road. Their energy fills the frame although the scale of their figures is diminutive. The body of one girl takes flight by the force of her exuberance, her blurred arms becoming wings. Kurland hitches the contemplative aspect of landscape to quotidian energy of the snapshot, creating both physical and emotional space for her heroines. In The End (2001), two tiny figures stand on the peak of a desert mound, their silhouettes camouflaged in a sea of cacti. They’re not surveying the landscape nor are they are they subsumed in it. Instead, they inhabit the threshold between the terms of actor and setting. The history of photography is a lonely place for women as subjects and producers and the thrill of Girl Pictures is how Kurland disarms the gendered legacies of landscape with a shrug.

Kurland’s landscapes make space for her teenage heroines within the American literary tradition of the quest narrative. The girls audition the characters from this tradition: runaway, explorer, cowboy, pirate, rebel. But, as stories go, not much happens in Girl Pictures. The girls smoke cigarettes, set fireworks, juggle, roast marshmallows, hula hoop, strum guitars, cuddle, play cards, horse around. They’re killing time, basking in the pleasures of being unproductive members of society, and storytelling abhors lollygagging. Pulsing with the ineffable joy of being a teenager, the book mixes bucolic and feral pleasures. Forest (1998) gathers a party of girls in a glade of trees. Three of them tenderly makeover a fourth, braiding her hair with flowers and applying lip stick. I feel like I’m witnessing a secret assembly of the Cottingley Fairies rather than an ordinary teen ritual lifted from a domestic setting. Kurland indulges a voyeuristic impulse to watch the girls without fetishizing them, making space for them while keeping their secrets. The photographs grant privileged access but refuse to narrate.

The emotional undertow of Girl Pictures lies in its nuanced portrayal of female intimacies. I see in the photographs the familiar camaraderie of friendship, the comfort of touch, the tension of competition, the play of mimicry, the libidinal pull of desire. I like her, I want to be her, I want her, I mother her, I love her, I see her. Strands of attachment knit together in barely perceptible dramas. Boys make an occasional appearance in Girl Pictures. At best they can fix a car (Pop the Hood, 1998) or provide some sexual healing (Making Happy, 1998) in an abandoned one. More often, they function as objects of scorn in a suite of images titled Boy Torture where they are teased, taunted, and physically brutalized. In Boy Torture: Love (1999), a crew gathers around a girl who’s taking off her top off while another covers the eyes of a boy. This gesture—to render him blind—is the photograph’s red herring. With her back to the camera, the girl strips for her female audience. They look at her and each other in a relay of looking, a circuit of curiosity and desire. This same energy animates Clothes Make the Man, Desert Scene (2001) with two girls absorbed by their reflection in a broken mirror. Kurland queers girlhood, harnessing the gravitational pull of the gaze as the central dynamic of her dramas.

Kurland observes in her catalog essay, “Cherry Bomb”: “being a teenage girl is nothing without the willingness and ability to posture as the teenage girl.” It’s this friction between identity and its cultural performance that’s at play in the photographs. In Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze from her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” male characters act within a context, drive the classic Hollywood story forward. Women appear as pure visual pleasure for the viewer, filling the frame of the screen. They are mirages without subjectivity. Kurland pushes beyond a reversal of Mulvey’s binary; being and appearing rub up against one another in her photographs. The girls decidedly occupy their landscapes but are nonchalant in their belonging with their Didion-like slouching dynamically repurposed. Their relationship to one another is their true landscape and this bond hums through even the most languorous scenes, no matter the numbers. In Field Trip (1998) and Golden Field (1998), the number of girls multiplies, loose-limbed armies picking their way through fields of tall grass and goldenrod. These crowd scenes massing suggests protest or pilgrimage, but their destinations remain uncertain. Kurland stages coming of age as a communal experience within space, rather than a singular, consuming quest through it. The centripetal force of the hula hoop pulses throughout Girl Pictures: “The intensity of our becoming funneled up vertically from where we sat.”

Risk limns the theatrics of rebellion and Kurland acknowledges the cracks in her idylls. Getting into Big Rig Cab (1997) touches the exposed nerve of her liberatory fantasies. The photograph depicts a girl standing by the open door on the passenger side of a truck, her backpack on the seat. Her glance telegraphs the moment as she weighs the perils of her escape, the cramped space of the cab a gauntlet to a separatist teen Eden. If Getting into Big Rig Cab plays on the familiar warnings of the runaway story, Kurland also allows less theatrical forms of anxiety to infiltrate. In Snow Angels (2000), four girls lie in a patch of land adjacent to a highway, the long, dead grass poking through a thin layer of white. Their faces are turned towards the gray sky, but their expressions are concealed by the camera’s positioning near the ground. Are they resting, exhausted from angel-making? Or is the camera bearing witness to dead bodies on the side of a road? The image plays on the troubling ambiguity of photographs and their capacity to collapse immediacy with memorial. This note of doubt complicates Kurland’s fictions of emancipation.

Forest Fire (2000), the last image of the book, depicts a solitary black girl weaving through a smoldering grove of trees, fires still blazing in the background. Kurland dreams a moment where rebellion turn to the revolutionary fire of burn the patriarchy. The protagonist represents one of the few black figures in these overwhelming white dramatic tableaux, and, in the context of this collection, the only one accorded a starring role in these escape fantasies. She’s disenfranchised from a community in this landscape and the implied catalyst of its destruction. Forest Fire channels the cultural freight of black female rage and the fault line of its ambivalence—only the ruins of her fury can be seen. The photograph offers a mea culpa, an acknowledgement of the blind spots of Kurland’s utopic vistas that exclude brown and black girls. But I also understood its canny placement as the book’s finale as an open question, clamoring even louder in the summer of 2020. Kurland’s once-girl retrospection tempers this fuck-it-all devastation with solemnity. How to move forward after burning it down? How to imagine freedom while accounting for the damages of history and culture? Girl Pictures links reverie and reckoning, welcoming the generative and unsettling place of uncertainty in her fantasies of liberation.

All the Women I Know in Tupelo Quarterly

An excerpt from my collaborative project with writer Christine Hume, All the Women I Know, appears in the twenty-third issue of Tupelo Quarterly.