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.

'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.

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.

Source: https://www.lauralarson.net/workshops

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.