William Larson (October 14, 1942 - April 4, 2019) is an American photographer who has influenced the photographic world with conceptual pieces that examine the role of technology in art.

Life

Larson completed his master's degree from the prestigious Institute of Design in Chicago in 1968, where he studied under Harry Callahan and

Aaron Siskind Aaron Siskind (December 4, 1903 – February 8, 1991) was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if ...

. Although he began his career half a century ago, he has never stopped analyzing and experimenting with the medium of photography. His first exploration dealt primarily with the issues of time, continuity, and movement. Larson was one of the first to create slit-scan photographs (see

strip photography Strip photography, or slit photography, is a photographic technique of capturing a two-dimensional image as a sequence of one-dimensional images over time, in contrast to a normal photo which is a single two-dimensional image (the full field) at ...

), made using medium format film and a special motorized camera. With these stretched-out images, Larson managed to portray the fluid feeling of moving cinema within a still photograph. At the same time, he displayed his incredible technical expertise. In his next step, Larson questioned the inherently “visual” aspect of image-making. Fascinated by the way a fax machine could convert a photograph using audio code, he used this new technological device to create works of art. Through the last few decades, Larson has delved into the moving image, investigating film projectors and toying with notions of video art. He has shown at Gallery 339, in Philadelphia, and is represented by Gitterman Gallery, in New York. Larson's continuing innovation in the field of photography has earned him many honors in the art community. His works can be found in many significant collections such as the George Eastman Museum, the

Center for Creative Photography The Center for Creative Photography (CCP), established in 1975 and located on the University of Arizona's Tucson campus, is a research facility and archival repository containing the full archives of over sixty of the most famous American pho ...

and the National Gallery of Australia, and in smaller quantities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

. Born in

North Tonawanda North Tonawanda is a city in Niagara County, New York, United States. The population was 31,568 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Buffalo–Niagara Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city is named after Tonawanda Creek, its south bo ...

, NY, Larson lived and worked out of Philadelphia, PA.

Awards

He has received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

(1982), a

Pew Fellowships in the Arts A pew () is a long bench seat or enclosed box, used for seating members of a congregation or choir in a church, synagogue or sometimes a courtroom. Overview The first backless stone benches began to appear in English churches in the th ...

(2001), several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995, 1994, 1992, 1971, 1979, 1986), two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships (1988, 1983), an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship (1993), and two grants from the Polaroid Corporation (1979).

References

External links

Gallery 339Brief Article
American photographers Living people 1942 births Pew Fellows in the Arts People from North Tonawanda, New York {{US-photographer-stub