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.
In City of Incurable Women, photographer Laura Larson attempts an experiment of her own — one concerned with radical empathy. Equal parts research, prose, photographic intervention, and movement study, Larson intersperses poetic reflections and contemporary photography with found images and historic documents, in an attempt to bridge the lived experience of women, through time, within and without the institution.
—Sarah Rose Sharp, Hyperallergic
9 x 7 inches, 216 pages, 88 color and black and white photographs
Saint Lucy Books (2022)