Lisa Larsen

Lisa Larsen (1925-1959) was a pioneering woman photojournalist.

Biography

Born in Germany, Lisa Larsen moved in the 1930s to the United States as a teenager and graduated from college when she was just 17.

Early career

Employed at the photography agency Black Star, as an office worker, she was apprenticed by Vogue, then freelanced for several years through Graphics House agency. Her assignments came from the New York Times Magazine, Parade, Glamour, Vogue, Charm and Holiday.

Life magazine

After 1948, the bulk of Larsen’s photojournalism was contract work for LIFE on which she served on staff from 1949 to 1959. Initially assigned mainly entertainment, celebrity and fashion stories, including the Vanderbilts, Kennedys, Bing Crosby, and the Duke of Windsor as well as the Greenbriar Hotel. However she picked up political stories; the official post-election portrait of First Lady Bess Truman and her daughter Margaret ; the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential campaign in 1950; the John F. Kennedy/Jacqueline Bouvier wedding in 1953; campaigning by Vice President Alben Barkley (who referred to the good-looking Larsen as “Mona Lisa.”)

International corespondent

Fluent in French, English, German and some Danish and Russian, Larsen was assigned international stories from the early 1950s; Iran’s Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in his New York hospital bed during the 1951 Iranian oil dispute with Great Britain who invited her to visit Iran for a two weeks in 1952 to photograph at Isfahan, Kum, Persepolis, and Shiraz; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly (1953); Queen Elizabeth II’s first royal tour; to the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama in 1954, where she talked to doctors, inspected labs, and went into the field to cover the assignment. A photograph from this assignment was selected by Edward Steichen for the 1955 world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was seen by 9 million visitors. It shows a broadly smiling young Guatamalan mother with a baby on her back in a sling, into which two little girls peer with evident delight. The tropical setting is apparent from the palm fronds in the background and the image is full of human warmth.

At the 1955 Bandung Conference promoting ties between Africa and Asia in Indonesia which Larson covered with Howard Sochurek she used a small portable tape recorder and two Leica cameras, and was often mentioned in the local press as an object of popular admiration. She then traveled through Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and China, spending four months in Moscow in 1956, where she attracted the admiration of Nikita Khrushchev.

Portraits

Larsen was noted by Life magazine editors for her capacity to gain the trust of portrait subjects. The first nationally-distributed photograph of Truman Capote was published in “LIFE Visits Yaddo,” a photo-essay by Larsen in the July 15, 1946 issue which includes a double portrait of Capote sitting at the feet of Marguerite Young. Larson was the only photographic correspondent permitted to photograph Yugoslavian leader Marshall Josip Tito at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia during his visit to the Soviet Union, and the first American photographer permitted to visit Outer Mongolia in over ten years in the summer of 1956, through invitation of the Mongolian ambassador whom she met in Moscow. In 1957 she reported on the social aftermath of the Polish Revolution and its effects on politics, industry, culture, and religion, and on displaced Hungarian refugees at camps in Yugoslavia, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. After covering Khrushchev again in 1958, on the anniversary of the 1945 “Liberation by the Red Army”, the Overseas Press Club of America that year honoured her for her reporting from Mongolia and in Poland with their Picture of the Year, magazine division, an award that would not go to a woman again for another forty years.

She said;

I feel it is very important to know your subjects as individuals. Ideally this takes time–and often you don’t have time. You work under pressure. . . . I dislike superficial and I especially dislike superficial relationships.”

Tributes

When Larsen died of breast cancer in 1959, LIFE remembered her in their editorial;

Lisa Larsen liked people. And because, while being thoroughly professional, she was a very attractive person the people she photographed came to like her too.... In Russia in 1956, Khrushchev developed such admiration for her and her indefatigable work habits that he gave her a bouquet of peonies. Later she inspired an aside from Khrushchev during one of his cocky anti-Western speeches. "Don't misunderstand me, " he said, eying her in the audience. "There is an American girl standing in front of me. Americans are good people.”

Last week Lisa Larsen died. In 10 years with LIFE she had made a brilliant name for herself and won a shelf full of photographic awards…Her colleagues on LIFE — photographers, reporters, writers, editors — share the never-flagging interest she had in people. They will try to fill the gap, but they will sadly miss her vivacity and warmth.

Exhibitions

1950 Color Photography, May 9–July 4, 1950, The Museum of Modern Art 1950 Photographs by 51 Photographers, August 1–September 17, 1950 The Museum of Modern Art 1951 Memorable Life Photographs, November 20–December 12, 1951 The Museum of Modern Art 1955 The Family of Man January 24–May 8, 1955 The Museum of Modern Art 1957 Photographs by Lisa Larsen, Jan 15–Mar 30, 1957, Art Institute Chicago [1] 1958 70 Photographers Look at New York November 27, 1957–April 15, 1958 The Museum of Modern Art 1964 Art in a Changing World: 1884–1964: Edward Steichen Photography Center May 27, 1964 The Museum of Modern Art 2017 UNGARN 56: Bilder einer Revolution, 20 Oct 2016 – 29 Jan 2017 Westlicht, Austria 2011 American way of LIFE, 2 Nov – 24 Dec 2011, Galerie Stephen Hoffman, Germany 2005 Woman of LIFE, 7 Jul – 12 Aug 2005, Alan Klotz Gallery, USA 2018University of Michigan Museum of Art: LIFE Magazine 1947 Homecoming Photographs, August 25 - November 18, 2018 [2]

Awards

1953 Magazine Photographer of the Year 1958 Overseas Press Club award