On the Photography of Laura Larson

“Disruptive” technologies (like those that facilitate the sharing of a picture of your dessert with 700 friends) have stripped imaging of the magic transport the medium once held even into the late part of the last century. Laura Larson is among a growing number of artists/photographers seeking access to the mystery, doubt, and even blatant hokeyness of the dubious image, especially those purporting to document the paranormal.

Photography's emergence in the mid-19th century created a boom of affordable portraiture that contributed to the rise in both spiritualism and the occult, biproducts of anxieties related to the “invisible” workings of modern communication inventions like the telegraph and the camera. Little has changed; in the entertainment industry ghosts and the undead remain a huge business, with cable channels overrun with pseudoscientific researchers clownishly exploring sites of local legend or of actual trauma. Larson's art addresses several areas of this rich historic “material”; the poignant “unseen” cradling of infants in early photography, unsettling reenactments of psychic documentation, and in the introduction of apparitional smoke into an abandoned asylum and forest.

Ecotoplasm, the supposed gooey physical manifestation that flows from a subject's orifices during a trance, appears here as embroidery, or maybe festive “silly string” emanating from a nipple or, hysterically, from between a woman's legs in Larson's witty contemporary approximations of these contrived but weirdly compelling setups. As a photography educator myself, I have been exposed to countless examples of urban obsolescence or “ruin porn”—the frequently romantic depiction of unoccupied places of decay, neglect, or natural disaster. Larson's images, while beautiful, mildly aestheticize the interior of an Athens, Ohio, asylum, but Larson activates the pictures further with the subtle presence of smoke or haze, ephemeral traces awaiting translation.

Larson's work may operate as nostalg