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.
