Laura Larson

Mining the intersection between documentary and lyrical concerns, Laura Larson’s work looks to photography’s histories to tell personal and sociocultural stories about women’s experiences. She’s exhibited her work extensively, at such venues as Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work is held in the collections of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Hidden Mother (2017), her first book, was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photo Book Prize. Larson organized a companion exhibition—the first to be devoted to the vernacular subject of hidden mother photography to be presented in the U.S.—that traveled from 2014-16. She is the recipient of grants from Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council and the New York Foundation of the Arts, and of residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Larson’s second book, City of Incurable Women (2022), imagines the complex lives of 19th century women, diagnosed as suffering from hysteria, as rebellious spirits haunting the present.