I’ve been remiss in posting, loyal Substack friends, these long, winter months for all the reasons: seasonal ennui, world on fire, the imminent event of my teen launching into so-called, adult life. I’m too old to make resolutions (I’ll post twice a month!) so it’s a welcome change to feel energized to reach out to say hello. Everything and nothing going on. Here are the highlights!

The Center for Print and Collaborative Arts Fundraiser

Since moving to Columbus, I’ve been working with The Columbus Printed Arts Center, a non-profit community space, founded by Elisa and Shawn Smith. The Center offers affordable print facilities, workshops, and organizes exhibitions and other programming. In its beginnings, the Center was housed in a former factory that manufactured fire engines at the turn of the century. In December 2020, I presented Return to Sender, an exhibition in collaboration with Suzanne Silver. Over the course of three months, we took turns making and installing new works, expanding upon a mail exchange we began in the lonely, early months of Covid-19.

In 2023, I worked with Elisa and Luke Stettner to organize the first Columbus Art Book Fair. Our mission was to provide an expansive and equitable platform for local, regional, and national producers and distributors of artist books, zines, print editions and more. The event also included experimental performances to explore the role of printed matter within interdisciplinary practices. The fair was held at The Pizzuti Collection at The Columbus Museum of Art. Participation was free of charge and featured 46 vendors from 14 states, Italy, and The Netherlands.

The Center is entering a new, thrilling chapter, heralded by its name change, The Center for Print and Collaborative Arts. In January 2025, Elisa and Luke signed a lease on a sprawling space of 22,000 square feet in the Southern Orchards neighborhood of our fair city. In addition to the print facilities, the space will include artist studios, a bookstore, a gallery and a community garden. The site will allow them to expand their programming and grow their mission with ambition and purpose.

It’s been a long haul and has cost a pretty penny getting the space ready, but they will, at last, open their doors in June. To get them through the home stretch, they are holding a fundraiser print sale featuring over 60 artists including the brilliance of Dionne Lee, Gina Osterloh, Whitney Hubbs, Carmen Winant, and many, many more. Prints are $150 each and the sale runs until May 11th. I donated one too. If you have the funds, please consider supporting this extraordinary project.

The Whisperers at Ditch Projects

My year did begin on an inspirational note with The Whisperers, a group show curated by artist Tannaz Farsi and art historian Simone Ciglia presented at Ditch Projects from January 17 - February 15. The exhibition featured artists whose practices utilize archival research to bring historical artifacts and images into a critical, contemporary sphere. The show included work by Noor Abuarafeh, Disobedience Archive, Shadi Harouni, MoRE, Zora J Murff, Gala Porras-Kim, Wendy Red Star, Service Works, and Stephanie Syjuco.

Ciglia and Farsi write: “To whisper is to hold words in the mouth, away from the vocal cords, letting them rumble, mutter, whistle or hiss out into the world, often into the ear of another, intent on receiving. This act is sometimes seen as clandestine; a private form of communication intended to incite and arouse rebellion. In this exhibition, we see its potential for arousal as a means of creation: to establish networks of tangential affinities, to parallel multiple modes of artistic and curatorial practice that can expand the potential for historical recovery, and to acknowledge longstanding systems of oppression by engaging practices that assert their own terms of representing subjecthood and empowering sovereignty.”

Whispering holds special meaning for City of Incurable Women. In the book, I imagined conversations between the women who resided at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, these circuits of knowledge and support within the institution. The hospital housed over 2000 women at any given time during Jean Martin Charcot’s tenure as hospital director when he conducted his research on hysteria. The history of the hospital is remembered through the case histories, privileging the relationships between doctor and patient, photographer and photographed subject. The life of this community of women, however, remained undocumented.

I produced a new suite of photograms where I worked with writing from the book—echoing whispers conspiring escape. I thought of these prints as notes passed back and forth between the women of Salpêtrière, an insistent, material trace of their resistance.

And I Realize There’s a Theme To This Newsletter

I worked with Elisa Smith and Tannaz Farsi when I was a professor at Ohio University. Tannaz graduated in 2007 with an MFA in Ceramics and Elisa earned her BFA in Photography in 2009. Beloved students then, dear friends and collaborators now.

Happiness Postscript

I’m taking a fantastic workshop, finding a way, somehow, through The New Art School Modality. It’s been a source of light and inspiration and I’ve heard incredible artists, activists, and scholars talk about their work. Highlights include Yasmin El-Rifae on Opantish (Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Assault) and Big Chief Demond Melancon on Black Masking Culture in New Orleans.

I’ll have a report on All the Women I Know in my next newsletter.

Finally, a favorite ritual of spring is welcoming baby owls to the Walhalla Ravine. I heard some hooting a couple weeks ago and had my first sighting yesterday. I’ll have to start packing my binoculars.

Thanks for reading. I’ll write again soon. xxLL

No woman I know before the baby, after the quarantine, before quitting, after coming out, before the diagnosis, after the divorce, before the miscarriage, before the hit, before the cops came.

—Christine Hume

The Center of Art Research at the University of Oregon invited me to produce a billboard for their site at 510 Oak. At 396 x 96”, it features six of the portraits from my collaborative image/text book with Christine Hume. The project was a revelation for me, pivoting from the intimacy of making small prints in the darkroom to working at this scale. Thrilling to learn the project can take (and make sense in) monumental form!

Winter session of Light & Ink: Photography and Writing workshop starts January 20, 2026

Enrollment is now open for Light & Ink: Photography and Writing. The workshop starts on January 20, 2026 and will run for eight weeks via Zoom. Participants will explore the generative possibilities between photography and writing in creative practice. How can language illuminate or disturb the seeming fact of a photograph? Can a photograph animate a text to create new meanings? Through readings and image presentations, we will study historical and contemporary works with an emphasis on books. These discussions will feed assignments, both in-class and out, where we will explore the material weave of image and text and its expressive potential to evoke, describe, and narrate.

I’m excited to announce that Kelli Connell will do a talk on her brilliant Pictures for Charis during one of the sessions. Pictures for Charis conjures the story of Charis Wilson, Edward Weston’s romantic partner and collaborator, tracing a path of their travels with her partner, artist Betsy Odom. The book tests different forms of research and experimentation to consider the wondrous and difficult relationship between desire, intimacy, and creativity, queering this mythic chapter of photography’s history.

This workshop is ideal for artists, photographers, and writers interested in image/text forms and is open to any level of experience. Consider it the antidote to winter blues! Please share on your socials!

Workshop tuition is $500 and enrollment is limited to 10 participants. To enroll, click here. If you need to work out a payment plan or if you have other questions, please contact me here.

Lee Marks (1948-2025)

My friend Lee Marks passed away on November 15th. I met Lee in 2012 when I was beginning my research on Hidden Mother. At the time, there was no writing or exhibitions on this vernacular form, no internet buzz. She and her spouse, John C. DePrez, Jr. had assembled a remarkable collection of hidden mothers, combing Indiana antique shops and thrift stores. They published a small book, The Hidden Presence, featuring highlights of their collection.

Lee and John welcomed me into their home, with a toddler and babysitter in town, and shared their collection and time with me. I made several visits and these trips were an enormous pleasure for me, talking with Lee for hours about our shared fascination with the material. I had never written a book but I knew in my heart that I had one in me. Lee’s generosity and trust fanned my courage to bring the book, and the traveling exhibition I organized, into the world. Their support continued long after Hidden Mother was published: pep talks, sharing my book widely, happily brainstorming with me.

Lee made many and lasting contributions to the photography world. She was a founding member of AIPAD, and served for many years on its board and as its president. She was a consultant to Pierre Apraxine, curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, and catalogued their collections. She also wrote the extensive plate notes for the catalog, Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company. I vividly remember seeing the Gilman exhibition at the Met when I first moved to NYC. I guess she had been making an impression on me long before I met her. I will miss her dearly.

It’s early but here are some things I loved in 2025:

Writing with at Louis Place

I turned 60 in February and swam with stingrays.

Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert, published by Magic Hour Press

Dancing with Fili Pelacchi at Flux and Flow

Learning how to roller skate!

Keisha Scarville’s show, Passports, at Higher Pictures

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

More concretions!

A visit to the Three Sisters, the oldest trees in Ohio, with dear friends

Tacita Dean’s exhibition Blind Folly at the Columbus Museum of Art

More forts!

Veiled Presence: The Hidden Mothers and Sara VanDerBeek at the Norton Museum of Art

Jennifer Reeves’s film, The Gloria of Your Imagination, seen at the Unorthodocs Fest at the Wexner Center for the Arts

I just finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and my goodness, it was a page turner.

Thanks for reading. I’ll write again soon. xxLL

The divination deck for All the Women I Know will be on sale from September 19-22 in honor of the autumnal equinox. The equinox perfectly embodies the spirit of the project: black and white photography’s harmony between light and dark, gratitude for the dualities of collaboration, and an appreciation for collective abundance.

For the past five years, writer Christine Hume and I have been collaborating on an image/text book, All the Women I Know, to be published by Saint Lucy Books later this fall. Blending portraiture, collective biography, and cultural criticism, this work of creative nonfiction catalogues a chorus of resistance by women in intimate, ethical, and political dimensions. The Racial Imaginary Institute commissioned this iteration of the book for their third biennial exhibition and symposium, For Real For Real, which considers radical ways of depicting a life.

Each card is unique and features a black and white portrait with an accompanying text. Held in a flip book box, there are 53 cards in the deck, which is divided into five elements: air, earth, fire, water, and aether, each with its own color and sigil derived from a 19^th century figure skating manual.

From September 19-22, the deck’s on sale for $60 or two for $100 on my website. All sales support printing costs for the book.

Thanks for reading! I’ll write again soon. xLL

All the Women I Know

File under, reader, I wept: Christine and I received this documentation of visitors to for real for real with a report of an impromptu reading of the cards in our divination deck. I couldn’t think of a more perfect reception/enactment of this project. There’s something about seeing the cards in these women’s hands and imagining their voices reciting the texts. I want to believe in audiences as catalysts and collaborators especially in an art world set on branding and commodification. These photographs (and the imagined voices of these women) reminded me of the sound pieces we produced, which embraced all the women as a chorus. Have a listen to Mariana, a collaboration with Sue Harshe, a Columbus based musician.

The deck’s available for purchase on my website and all sales will support the production costs for All the Women I Know to be published by Saint Lucy Books. We’re working hard with Crisis Studio on the design for the book and on track for a late 2025 release. Updates soon!

Double Feature

Speaking of Saint Lucy Books, the brilliant Mark Alice Durant has edited a new book for the imprint, Double Feature. The collection features over 200 vernacular images from the collection of artist Patrick Pound coupled with texts from 44 writers exploring ideas of doubling evoked by the photographs. I wrote a short piece, “Kin Song,” inspired by several images but this is the image that stole my heart.

Light & Ink: Photography and Writing

September 16 - November 4, 6-8 PM EDT

Enrollment is now open for the fall session of Light & Ink: Photography and Writing. In this workshop, participants will explore the generative possibilities between photography and writing in creative practice. How can language illuminate or disturb the seeming fact of a photograph? Can a photograph animate a text to create new meanings? Through readings and image presentations, we will study historical and contemporary works with an emphasis on books. These discussions will feed assignments, both in-class and out, where we will explore the material weave of image and text and its potential to evoke, describe, and narrate.

The class is for photographers who write, writers who make photos, and any artists interested in image/text forms. Open to all levels. We will meet via Zoom on Tuesday evenings from 6-8 PM EDT for eight weeks.The tuition is $500 and enrollment is capped at 10. For more information, click here. If you need to work out a payment plan, please contact me here.

Thanks for reading. I’ll write again soon.

xoLL

All the Women I Know Divination Card Deck

For the past five years, writer Christine Hume and I have been collaborating on an image/text book, All the Women I Know, to be published by Saint Lucy Books in Fall 2025. The book maps and embodies the on-going epidemic of sexual violence and the erosion of bodily autonomy in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision. Blending portraiture, collective biography, and cultural criticism, this work of creative nonfiction catalogues a chorus of resistance by women in intimate, ethical, and political dimensions. The project’s taken many forms including published excerpts, sound pieces, and a Zoom performance in the middle of Covid-19. It's brought me so much joy and hope during a time of enormous struggle and sadness.

Our most recent iteration of the project is a deck of divination cards commissioned by The Racial Imaginary Institute for their third biennial exhibition and symposium, For Real For Real, which considers radical ways of depicting a life. The exhibition is on view at daadgalerie through July 27, 2025. We’ve produced the deck in a limited edition of 200 to raise funds for the printing the book.

Our deck consists of 53 unique cards, gesturing both toward and beyond the standard game deck. Though it comes with instructions, we encourage play and chance encounters as much as cartomancy and storytelling. Divination is one way to explore our lives as they intertwine with others. Our cards address the specific ways gender scripts our experiences. Because conscious and collective resistance demands specialized intelligences, we have divided our deck into five elements: air, earth, fire, water, and aether, each with its own color and sigil derived from a 19^th century figure skating manual.

Christine has been rallying to make a deck since we started working together and I’m grateful to have been swept up in her enthusiasm and vision. Thank you to Elana Schlenker for her brilliant design and hard work on a tight deadline.

The deck’s available for purchase on my website for $100 in a limited edition of 200. All sales will support the production costs for the book. Thank you for your support in all the forms it takes.

State of the Sky at Mattress Factory

Last year, I produced series of photograms inspired by an Emily Dickinson’s poem, Make me a picture of the sun (188) for Luke Stettner’s project, State of the Sky, at the Mattress Factory. Some of these prints have been installed in the solar darkroom, a feature of the exhibition, alongside works by Stettner, Calista Lyon, Sheilah ReStack, and Suzanne Silver.

Make me a picture of the sun—
So I can hang it in my room—
And make believe I'm getting warm
When others call it "Day"!

Draw me a Robin—on a stem—
So I am hearing him, I'll dream,
And when the Orchards stop their tune—
Put my pretense—away—

Say if it's really—warm at noon—
Whether it's Buttercups—that "skim"—
Or Butterflies—that "bloom"?
Then—skip—the frost—upon the lea—
And skip the Russet—on the tree—
Let's play those—never come!

Hidden Histories of Photography at 21C Chicago

Chicago friends! I’ll be giving a talk about my work at 21C Hotel on Saturday, June 21st at 2:00 PM. I’ll discuss the relationship between archival research and creative practice in Hidden Mother and City of Incurable Women. The event is free!

My visit is co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary of Photography as part of their programming for Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. I’ve lent four hidden mother photographs from my collection for the exhibition.

Thanks for reading. I’ll write again soon.

Love,

Laura

Spring Workshops

Light & Ink: Photography and Writing / April 15 - June 3, 6-8 PM EDT

Enrollment is now open for the spring session of Light & Ink: Photography and Writing. Participants will explore the generative possibilities between photography and writing in creative practice. How can language illuminate or disturb the seeming fact of a photograph? Can a photograph animate a text to create new meanings? Through readings and image presentations, we will study historical and contemporary works with an emphasis on books. These discussions will feed assignments, both in-class and out, where we will explore the material weave of image and text and its potential to evoke, describe, and narrate.

The class is for photographers who write, writers who make photos, and any artists interested in image/text forms. Open to all levels. Starting on April 15, we will meet via Zoom on Tuesday evenings from 6-8 PM EDT for eight weeks.The tuition is $450 and enrollment is capped at 10. For more information, click here.

The Maternal Medium: Photography and Motherhood / April 19 - June 7 1-3 PM EDT

Culturally, the roles of artist and mother have been positioned as diametrically opposed and impossible to reconcile. This workshop emerges from a belief in the fertile & overlapping, if sometimes conflicting, energies of mothering and making art. How can documentary and lyrical approaches to motherhood bear witness and express these personal experiences? How is photography uniquely suited to the character of maternal time?

Weekly sessions will be devoted to reading discussions, image presentations, guest speakers and critiques. We’ll discuss a broad range of topics including motherhood myths, abortion & reproductive health care, pregnancy loss, bad mommies & forbidden feelings, maternal labor & child care, and queer families. We will read Rosellen Brown, Hervé Guibert, Sarah Manguso, and Alice Walker, and consider the works of Mary Kelly, Deana Lawson, Keisha Scarville, and Carmen Winant among others. Each participant will present work twice during the workshop. You will have the option of presenting works-in-progress and/or making new work in response to assignment prompts linked to the discussions and presentations. The goal is to create an environment that’s responsive to your needs, whether its feedback for a current project or seeding new ideas.

The workshop is for all artists and writers who are curious to begin new work about motherhood or are currently working on a project engaged with its myriad subjects. Open to all levels. You don’t have to be a mama to take this workshop, but it will certainly be a welcome space if you are. Starting on April 19, we will meet via Zoom on Saturday afternoons from 1-3 PM EDT for eight weeks. The tuition is $450 and enrollment is capped at 8 participants. For more information, click here:

Please share on your social networks!

A little background about my workshops

As I was putting this newsletter together, I realized I should share some of my history as a teacher. Since 1999, I’ve taught in a wide range of programs including the School of the International Center of Photography, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and most recently as co-chair of Photography at Bard MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. At the beginning of the pandemic, I elected to take a buy-out from Ohio University where I had taught photography for sixteen years, leaving my position of Full Professor. I made the decision for many reasons, mostly because of my disillusionment with academia’s alignment with market-based thinking. I love teaching and the university increasingly felt like a hostile environment for my values as an educator. I leapt into the void.

The last few years have been pivotal in my career as I’ve shifted away from the security of tenure and worked towards the sustainability of my practice as an artist and a teacher. In 2021, Justine Kurland invited me to co-teach a projects workshop on Zoom, a profoundly rewarding experience especially during a time of great isolation. Her generosity and invention encouraged me to imagine alternative spaces for learning that could cultivate risk-taking, critical thinking, and mutual support. I started offering my own workshops guided by these objectives with an eye to my strengths as an interdisciplinary artist.

All of this is to say THANK YOU to everyone who’s taken a workshop with me and has helped spread the word about them. I’ve met incredible folks, many I now count as friends, and I’m excited to continue this experiment and grow these programs in the future.

In Brief

Suzanne Silver and I brought Folds to Mariani Gallery at University of Northern Colorado this winter. We had the opportunity to install some early works from our collaboration and make coda pieces for the project. Exhibition catalogs are for sale here.

Christine Hume and I are hard at work on All the Women I Know, our forthcoming, collaborative book to be published by Saint Lucy Books this fall. We’re also producing a secret, satellite object of/from ATWIK for an exhibition in Berlin this May. More information on that in the next newsletter but here’s a sneak peek.

I’ll write again soon and thanks for listening. LL

Winter Workshop

Light & Ink: Photography and Writing starts January 6

Enrollment is now open for Light & Ink: Photography and Writing. The workshop starts on January 6, 2025 and will run for eight weeks via Zoom. Participants will explore the generative possibilities between photography and writing in creative practice. How can language illuminate or disturb the seeming fact of a photograph? Can a photograph animate a text to create new meanings? Through readings and image presentations, we will study historical and contemporary works with an emphasis on books. These discussions will feed assignments, both in-class and out, where we will explore the material weave of image and text and its expressive potential to evoke, describe, and narrate.

One of the highlights of my fall was teaching Light & Ink. This was the second time I’d offered this course. I learned a tremendous amount from a phenomenal group of artists. They made great work and worked hard to make the experience a generative and supportive one for each other. The participants also offered helpful feedback on how to continue to develop the class, which I’m excited to incorporate in its next iteration. (Thank you!)

The class is for photographers who write, writers who make photos, and artists of any stripe interested in hybrid forms. Open to all levels. The tuition is $450 and enrollment is capped at 10. For more information, click here. Please share on your social networks!

I’m developing a new workshop to be offered in early spring. Let’s call it Light & Ink, Part 2 until I come up with a more snazzy title. Stay tuned for details.

Folds exhibition catalog

In the early months of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order, Suzanne Silver and I began a collaborative mail exchange. We made works for each other, then replied to ones received. From this looping call and response, a collection of small works accumulated, embodying our experiences of loss, sorrow, vulnerability, and rage: a living record of our response to the pandemic and the epidemic of anti-black racism and police violence.

In November 2020, we organized this exchange into an exhibition, Return to Sender, for the Columbus Printed Arts Center. The Center is in a former factory that manufactured fire engines at the turn of the century. Working together, we wore masks in this yawning space but mostly we worked alone. Over the course of three months, we took turns making and installing new works, continuing to build from our collaboration’s central concerns. Language of the wound was central to the exhibition: prick, puncture, gash, slash. These words became figures of speech signaling blind spots, erasures, and trap doors—a semaphore of vulnerability and resistance.

Folds emerged from these experiences. We wanted to bring more voices into the fold, as it were. We extended an invitation to twenty-eight artists and writers to participate in the exhibition with this prompt:

Unfolding is key to our curatorial premise: each participant will create a work and send it to the next as an inspiration for theirs, setting into motion a collaborative constellation. All works must be sent through the mail, either in a standard size envelope or a form no larger than 9 x 12”. With inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and Harry Smith’s paper airplanes, each artist will be prompted to activate the fold as form and concept and consider the mailed object’s potential to expand and collapse, travel and collect. By embracing the conditions of scale and risk inherent in shipping, the works will explore the aesthetics and ethics of contingency and serendipity and repair.

Folds returns to the intimate act of mail correspondence while bringing together a wider community of collaborators. Each artist had a week to respond to their received work before sending theirs to the next participant. With the demand for a quick response, we hoped to create the conditions for intuitive leaps. We were interested in the productive pressure of constraint and how to tap the meaning of fold as an experience of congregation. The project launched from Siena, Italy with Silver’s Illuminated Newspaper in June 2023 and concluded in Columbus, OH with Larson’s Assembly in August 2024, traveling throughout the U.S. in between.

We’re bringing the exhibition to Mariani Gallery, University of Northern Colorado (Greeley, CO) where it will be on view from January 21-February 27, 2025. Thanks to Belle-Pilar Fleming for the invitation.

Participating artists include Erica Baum, Sophia Chai, Moyra Davey, Amber Elison, Christine Heindl, Sara Hess, Christine Hume, Rhea Karam, Justine Kurland, Dionne Lee, Laura Larson, Laura Lisbon, Mary Lum, Aspen Mays, Klea McKenna, Christian Patterson, Camille Paulhan, Jenny Perlin, Dani & Sheilah ReStack, Julia Schwartz, Lizzie Scott, Suzanne Silver, Lydia Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Luke Stettner, Jo-ey Tang, Catherine Taylor, Carmen Winant, and Vanessa Woods.

Catalog designed by Ry Wharton. 58 pages with color reproductions. It’s a small run so get your copy soon. You can order yours here.

Second printing of Hidden Mother

She’s here! Thank you to everyone who supported its second printing and especially Mark Alice Durant and Guenet Abraham. Get your copy from Saint Lucy Books.

Other things that made me happy

Micamera hosted me for a reading of City of Incurable Women on November 5th. In spite of my election dread, I enjoyed myself immensely and met some lovely folks. I took the train to Paris the next day, staring out the window at the Alps, then Lake Geneva, and finally the French countryside. During my time in Paris, I saw the remarkable Chantal Akerman exhibition at the Jeu de Palme and satisfied a life dream of seeing the catacombs. I’m still living with the mutating dread but I’m grateful for the pleasure and solace of these experiences.

I’m honored to have contributed a print for the States of Change fundraiser, running from October 29-November 4. The fundraiser will support grassroots organizations working on the ground to fight voter suppression in this year’s battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). As election day approaches, polls continue to show a frighteningly close race, and the legal and rhetorical groundwork is being laid to challenge the validity of the results. Their inaugural fundraiser in 2020 raised 1.5 million dollars in less than a week. I hate that we have to fundraise to defend democracy but if you have the do-re-mi, please consider buying one of the incredible works for sale. Lots of gems including Columbus friends Dionne Lee, Gina Osterloh, and Carmen Winant.

City of Incurable Women at Micamera Bookstore

I’m getting ready for a trip to Milan where I’ll be presenting City of Incurable Women in a reading at the legendary Micamera on November 5th. (That’s right, Election Day.) Book signing will follow the event. Copies of the second run of Hidden Mother will be available too. Send your Milan recommendations my way!

Folds Exhibition Conversation and Closing

Suzanne Silver and I will be in conversation about Folds, our collaborative exhibition project on view at Project: ARTspace on Wednesday, November 13. The closing will run from 6-8 PM and we’ll begin the talk at 6:30. Several participating artists will be there too. We’ll discuss the genesis of our collaboration and how this shaped our approach to organizing the exhibition.

More about Folds in the November newsletter!

In November 2020, we organized this exchange into an exhibition, Return to Sender, for the Columbus Printed Arts Center. The Center is in a former factory that manufactured fire engines at the turn of the century. Working together, we wore masks in this yawning space but mostly we worked alone. Over the course of three months, we took turns making and installing new works, continuing to build from our collaboration’s central concerns. Language of the wound was central to the exhibition: prick, puncture, gash, slash. These words became figures of speech, signaling blind spots, erasures, and trap doors—semaphores of vulnerability and resistance.

Folds emerged from these experiences. Suzanne and I wanted to bring more voices into the fold, as it were. We extended an invitation to thirty artists and writers to participate in the exhibition with this prompt:

Unfolding is key to our curatorial premise: each participant will create a work and send it to the next as an inspiration for theirs, setting into motion a collaborative constellation. All works must be sent through the mail, either in a standard size envelope or a form no larger than 9 x 12”. With inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and Harry Smith’s paper airplanes, each artist will be prompted to activate the fold as form and concept and consider the mailed object’s potential to expand and collapse, travel and collect. By embracing the conditions of scale and risk inherent in shipping, the works will explore the aesthetics and ethics of contingency and serendipity and repair.

Folds returns to the intimate act of mail correspondence while mapping a wider expanse for collaboration. Each artist had a week to respond to their received work before sending theirs to the next participant. With the demand for a quick response, we hoped to create the conditions for intuitive leaps. We were interested in the productive pressure of constraint and how to tap the meaning of fold as an experience of congregation. The project launched from Siena, Italy with Silver’s Illuminated Newspaper in June 2023 and concluded in Columbus, OH with my Assembly in August 2024, traveling throughout the U.S. in between.

For over a year, the conversation unfurled and shapeshifted through a range of media including books, collage, drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. While the exhibition was produced in chronological time, its sense of time is elastic—pausing, repeating, buckling, stretching, dissolving. Spurred by the scale restrictions, all of the works are delicately tactile, and many offer multiple presentations. They can be flattened, doubled, pleated, and transformed from two to three dimensions. The unfolding spun a twisting pattern rather than a straight line of associations. Unlike the construction of an exquisite corpse, every work talks back and poses a question. Some works echoed their predecessors while others pivoted. The ephemera of daily life like newspapers and handwritten correspondence appear and reappear. The news itself became fodder: the war in Gaza, the fight for reproductive health care justice, the migration crisis. The cosmological and the spiritual leaking into the everyday.

A fold is a material memory, a crease that can’t be undone. Folds convenes around the hopeful act of care and connection, holding the history of being held.

Participating artists include Erica Baum, Sophia Chai, Moyra Davey, Amber Elison, Christine Heindl, Sara Hess, Christine Hume, Rhea Karam, Justine Kurland, Dionne Lee, Laura Larson, Laura Lisbon, Mary Lum, Aspen Mays, Klea McKenna, Christian Patterson, Camille Paulhan, Jenny Perlin, Dani & Sheilah ReStack, Julia Schwartz, Lizzie Scott, Suzanne Silver, Lydia Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Luke Stettner, Jo-ey Tang, Catherine Taylor, Carmen Winant, and Vanessa Woods.

Project: ARTspace is located at 99 Madison Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY and is open Monday - Friday, 11am - 5pm.

A catalog is forthcoming, designed by Ry Wharton.

Opening reception will be held Wednesday, September 25 from 6-8 PM and the exhibition will be on view until November 13.

Hope to see you soon!

Photo by Matthew Pevear

FALL WORKSHOPS!

Light & Ink: Photography and Writing

Starting September 26, I’m offering a six-week workshop, Light & Ink: Photography and Writing, via Zoom. Participants will explore the generative possibilities between photography and writing in creative practice. How can language illuminate or disturb the seeming fact of a photograph? Can a photograph animate a text to create new meanings? Through readings and image presentations, we will study historical and contemporary works with an emphasis on books. These discussions will feed assignments, both in-class and out, where we will explore the material weave of image and text and its expressive potential to evoke, describe, and narrate. The tuition is $350 and enrollment is capped at 10.

The class is for photographers who write, writers who make photos, and artists of any stripe interested in hybrid forms. Open to all levels. For more information, click here.

Advanced Critique Group with PhotoPhlo

I work with PhotoPhlo, a fantastic educational forum offering an array of workshops including Critique Groups. Critique groups meet monthly and participants sign on for a six month commitment. I’m leading an advanced group this fall. Whether you’re already working on a project or looking to begin something new, the group will provide a space for critical feedback and community support. You’ll be expected to present work in each session. It’s a fantastic way to meet new people who will lovingly hold you accountable to push on with your project.

Applicants for the group should be experienced photographers who have an ongoing creative practice, have completed several portfolios of work, and have previously participated in a critique group. Applicants will be asked to submit 10 images and a brief statement about their work and goals for the course.

The group begins Tuesday, October 1st and the tuition for six months is $600. We’ll meet on Tuesdays from 6-8 PM EDT and enrollment is capped at five members. For more information, click here.

Update on second edition of Hidden Mother

I met the fundraising goal to cover production costs for the second edition of Hidden Mother. Yay! We’re preparing the files to send to the printer and will have the books in hand later this fall. In the meantime, I still have prints available of Sky touching sky, a photogram of a text drawing, improvising on a line from the book:

Early portrait studios, equipped with skylights, depended on sunny skies to bathe sitters in light, a flood required to coax an image from recalcitrant emulsions. I imagine the day Gadisse was born: the sun warming her skin, its rays eventually finding mine. Our skies touching.

The fundraiser’s an open edition of 8 x 10” resin-coated prints. I’m making these babies in the darkroom myself. Each print is $100 and for $150, you can order a print with a signed copy of the book. For more information about the fundraiser, click here. Thank you to everyone who purchased a print. I appreciate you!

Recommendations

On my third visit to Pittsburgh this year, I saw Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It’s a fantastic roster of artists critically engaging the conventions of landscape to take on the violent histories of land appropriation and climate change. Melissa Catanese produced a gorgeous installation of carbon prints, cyanotypes, and digital photographs, inspired by Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.”

As a printer, I nerd out on Dionne Lee’s work but I fall hard for her sly and subtle interventions in and on the land. We share a love of rocks.

Other greats: a selection of Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, Sam Contis’s Overpass series, AK Burns, and Sky Hopinka.

More soon + thanks for listening—

Laura

Second edition of Hidden Mother + fundraiser print edition

Saint Lucy Books and I are publishing a second edition of my first book, Hidden Mother. Hidden Mother tells the story of my daughter’s adoption as mapped though nineteenth-century hidden mother photographs. The term “hidden mother” refers to the widespread but little-known practice in 19^th century portrait photography of concealing a mother’s body as she supported and calmed her child during the lengthy exposures demanded by early photographic technology. In the final portrait of the child, the mother—often covered from head-to-toe in a black drop cloth—appears as an uncanny figure. A practical strategy deployed by the photographer unintentionally yielded an evocative representation of the mother. Never meant to be seen, her presence nonetheless haunts these images. Hidden Mother enlists these strange and powerful images to present a poetic account of becoming a mother through adoption.

Hidden Mother sold out in 2022 when we were in the throes of getting City of Incurable Women into the world. We plan to have the books in hand in September. In the meantime, I’m making an edition of a new work, Sky touching sky, to support the printing costs. It’s a photogram of a text drawing, improvising on a line from the book.

Here’s an excerpt from the section:

Early portrait studios, equipped with skylights, depended on sunny skies to bathe sitters in light, a flood required to coax an image from recalcitrant emulsions. I imagine the day Gadisse was born: the sun warming her skin, its rays eventually finding mine. Our skies touching.

The fundraiser’s an open edition of 8 x 10” resin-coated prints. I’m making these babies in the darkroom myself. Each print is $100 and for $150, you can order a print with a signed copy of the book. For more information about the fundraiser, click here. Thank you for your support in all the forms it takes.

Nineteenth Century Photography Now

Selections from City of Incurable Women are on view in a group exhibition at The Getty, Nineteenth Century Photography Now, curated by Karen Hellman and Carolyn Peter. The installation includes pages from the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, images that were a touchstone for the project, displayed in a case alongside my work. Featuring 22 artists, the exhibition offers new perspectives on early photography by looking through the lens of contemporary artists who respond directly to their historical themes and subject matter.

The installation includes two from a series of ambrotypes I made very early in the project with the support of Geoffrey Berliner at the Penumbra Foundation. I’m thrilled to be showing these photographs for the first time.

As part of the exhibition, I will chat with Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Stephanie Syjuco about our work for the event, Converging Lenses: Contemporary Responses to 19th Century Photography, on Sunday, May 19th at 2:00 PM. The conversation will be moderated by Carolyn Peter. Register here for free tickets.

Recommendations

I’ve had the good fortune to work in the solar darkroom constructed by Luke Stettner and Calista Lyon at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. It’s a facet of Luke’s exhibition The State of the Sky. (I produced the fundraiser photogram during one of my residencies in the space.) It’s a magical place, aligning the alchemy of analog printing with the vicissitudes of the sun and sky. If you have the chance, check out the show, which is on view through January 4, 2026. It’s a much-needed testimony to the vital and prismatic energies of collaboration.

I subscribe to the bi-weekly newsletter from Louis Place, written/compiled by Steffani Jemison and Quincy Flowers. These missives have been a compass for finding my way as a writer and a citizen. This week’s was a doozy with its focus on teaching including a marvelous poem by Thom Donovan, which nearly broke me in two. Over twenty years in, I’m still trying to figure out this teaching thing.

I’ll write again soon and thanks for listening.

LL