Laura Larson has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at venues such as Art in General; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; SFCamerawork; Susanne Vielmetter/L.A. Projects; and Wexner Center for the Arts.
KT: How did you get into photography? You being a professor of photography at Ohio University when/what was your first encounter with photography?
LL: I was an English major in college and took my first photography class in my sophomore year. I didn’t own a camera so I borrowed a friend’s Pentax K-1000.
The feminist practice has shaped my work from the very beginning and continues to be a source of inspiration for me. I want my photographs to telegraph the complex experiences of women. My earliest works that focused on domestic space emerged from this question: what does a feminist practice look like without depicting female bodies? With the dollhouses, the dolls are removed to focus on these miniature spaces and the stories suggested by these tiny rooms. With the hotel rooms, there’s a narrative aspect as well. Who was in this room? What happened? With this work, I also wanted to raise the subject of who cleans these rooms. How can the absence of a body be used strategically to raise a subject, that is, the manual labour of women, immigrant women? With Hidden Mother, I made this question—the absent body—quite literal.
KT: Your work is a brilliant mix of documentary and poetic practices, ranging from dollhouses to dirty hotel rooms to adoptive motherhood. On what basis do you select your subjects? How do you decide to get so intimate with your subject?
LL: I’m interested in why photographs are still so intimately linked to belief, their singular hold on the truth in visual art. I don’t believe in a strict partitioning of the truth and its presumed opposite, fiction. Rather, I’m interested in both the politics and poetics of photography.
KT: “The assumption of objectivity that continues to haunt photography—the desire to trust our eyes—is a central concern of my work”. Please comment
LL: I was introduced to hidden mother photographs while I was in the legal process of adopting my daughter. They appealed to my sensibilities: their macabre character, their dark humour. I immediately recognized in these photographs something of my experience of waiting to become a mother. These obscured women inhabit a strange space of being both close to and distanced from their child. This was how I felt about my daughter long before I met her. This feeling of attachment came through photographs, the very few I received of her during the seven-month wait for the adoption to be finalized. I was heartsick with longing during this time; it felt like a form of loss. I wanted to use the hidden mother images as a way to reflect the sense of attachment and loss that is at the very heart of mothering.
