“Radical Empathy” in City of Incurable Women: A Conversation with Laura Larson

Abstract

“Radical Empathy” in City of Incurable WomenA Conversation with Laura Larson Renee H. Shea (bio) 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. Click for larger view View full resolution LAURA LARSON, AUGUSTINE’S ESCAPE, DIGITAL COLOR PHOTOGRAPH, 2019 Larson has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including in the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Her first book, Hidden Mother (2017), was shortlisted by Aperture/Paris Photo for the Best First Photobook Award. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Rutgers University. Professor emerita at Ohio University, Larson is currently visiting faculty with the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in visual arts. Renee Shea: City of Incurable Women includes archival photographs from the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, published between 1876 and 1880 as a medical reference book, interwoven with writings from Charcot, other historical texts, your own photographs, and your lyrical written responses. How did this project begin and evolve? Laura Larson: The book started at a very basic level for me of looking at the photographs produced at Salpêtrière under the directorship of Charcot. The arc of my work for almost twenty years has been an engagement with nineteenth-century vernacular photographic forms. I was thinking about how I can look back at these different histories and make work in dialogue with it, not in a fetishistic or nostalgic way, but an investigation inspired by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida of the essential character of the medium, specifically from a feminist perspective. There’s incredible scholarship [End Page 45] and creative work on these photographs, but I was interested in how to respond to them in the present. I was making my photographs during the Trump administration, when language about women being out of control or in need of control was commonplace. I was trying to think through this notion of hysteria and hysterical women in relationship to this history. I wasn’t able to do archival research at Salpêtrière, but I went to Paris twice: to spend time on the grounds of the hospital, to think of how these women were moving in those spaces, and to visit other psychiatric institutions. The photographs I made in Paris are a way to bring these histories into the present. The production of my own work began in earnest in 2017. With the pandemic, things changed—I couldn’t work with groups of people in the studio, so there was an artificially imposed stopping point when I had to evaluate where I was and see if I had the material I needed to put the book together. This was when I started writing. I wrote almost all of those texts within two months, which is unusual for me since I’m a very slow writer! Initially, the project began as a collaboration with writer Maud Casey, responding to the photographs and case histories and exchanging our work for further response. Our concerns took us in different directions. Maud published her stories with Bellevue Press this year. I wanted to build a different context—a hybrid work—that looped the archival, the contemporary, and my presence as an interlocutor of this history. Shea: I’m fascinated by what seems to be your initial entry into this project: that the photography of the era...