Larson, William

American, 1942-2019

BiographyThroughout his career as an artist and educator, William Larson pursued interests in the representational conventions of photography and how the medium portrays time and space. His photography-based work is conceptual and at times experimental, but he maintained a commitment to the formal aspects and visual impact of the image. Larson is best known for his investigations using non-traditional media and different imaging technologies. In the early 1970s, for example, he used primitive fax machines to translate images into electric transmissions and back again into newly scrambled forms. He also worked with a modified slit-scan camera to create distorted nudes on extended lengths of a negative. In 1998, Larson expanded his explorations of photographic forms to include moving images and began to make works using video and digital projections.

Born in North Tonawanda, New York, Larson studied at Institute of Design in Chicago in the late 1960s, completing an MS in photography. He moved to Philadelphia in 1968 to establish the undergraduate photography program at the Tyler School of Art, where he later initiated the graduate photography program as well. Larson later served as the director of the graduate photography program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.