Larsen’s Focus

Previous Page
Continue Reading

 

Few other publications printed during the 1950’s had the clout of Life magazine, particularly during the first half of the decade, when the circulation topped five million and the readership probably ran four times that number.   Following 1955 the impact of television would quickly erode the magazine’s dominant position in the business of national image making.  For photojournalists this would be the height of their cachet.

Of the fifty photographers who were employed by Life to supply the weekly demand for images, virtually all were men.[14]  There were one or two well-known exceptions; Margaret Bourke-White is probably the best known.  Very few today would be able to identify Lisa Larsen as one of the ‘contract’ photographers at the magazine.  Even a glance at the photos she brought back to New York from New Hampshire demonstrates she was looking at something different.  What you see in her images of the 1952 campaign are processes and rare images of women participating in politics.  This was at a point in time when there was one woman in the United States Senate:  Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.

Larsen was a student of the elections.  The record of her work suggests that portraiture was a complex phenomenon for her.  You have the clear sense that she wanted to know what the work of the campaign entailed and she documented those people doing the work.  When she took portraits, the images supplied a context that she had explored.  She followed the women she photographed into their homes, into the domestic space where politics had not ventured before.