Photographer and educator Larsen (1921-2001) went to Black Mountain College in 1944, and became its first full-time photography teacher in 1949, teaching significant students including Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Stan VanDerBeek.
Contracting polio aged 10, she spent 3 years in hospital before going to high school. She used mobility aids for the rest of her life, “but those years in bed,” she said, “have made me begin to see things in a different light.” Her works capture an extraordinary sensitivity to bodies in space. Head to our blog to read more about her life and work, meeting Ruth Asawa at teacher training college, and capturing the magical life at Black Mountain with her camera.
Though her photography work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art and with the Photo League in New York, she stopped exhibiting after 1957, focusing on life as an educator, informed no doubt by her time at Black Mountain. The “individual revolution” she described there, she said, “comes about when we sort of get a picture of ourselves, an awareness of what is going on around us… And this kind of awareness brings about again its own spontaneous action that is unpredictable. And this is the utter joy of living this way.”
Image: Josef Albers teaching a class at Black Mountain College, c.1946. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.