All the Women I Know
Christine Hume and Laura Larson
Interlacing portraiture, collective biography, and cultural criticism, All the Women I Know, a collaborative text-image book by writer Christine Hume and photographer Laura Larson, maps the on-going epidemic of gendered violence and erosion of bodily autonomy. The project embodies a chorus of grief, rage, and resistance by women in an alternative archive that responds to Sarah Ahmed’s concept of complaint as feminist pedagogy and draws on the litany as a form of complaint and lament. All the Women I Know celebrates the emancipatory potential of refusal as it takes account of our connections and differences across intersectional divides. We use the word “woman” as an umbrella term, inclusive of all people who identify as women or who have had experiences coded as such, either by choice or social context.
Hume and Larson’s approach exploits collisions and misalignments between text and image to address how power and pain move through the body and the body politic. Larson’s photographs depict the women in her life, each turning away from the camera, a gesture at odds with the intimacy suggested in making a portrait. The images invite the viewer to imagine what they can’t see and thus to understand uncertainty viscerally. Hume’s text metabolizes the gendered scripts available within patriarchy in order to challenge the way we experience selfhood, narrative, and time. Each subject becomes a multitude, a collection of remixed identities, troubling photography’s promise of revelation and exploring the tension between individual and the collective. As such, the pronoun “she” becomes a fugal subject that immerses the reader in a temporal loop haunted by the suppression of women’s stories. By recovering strangeness, lived affect, and queered angles, All the Women I Know insists that the resistance to the lived stories of women is a resistance to justice.
Laura Larson is a photographer and writer based in Columbus, OH. She’s exhibited her work extensively, at such venues as Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, The Getty Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Wexner Center for the Arts and her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her work is held in the collections of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, The Getty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Microsoft, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New York Public Library, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), her first book, was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photo Book Prize. Larson organized a companion exhibition—the first to be devoted to this vernacular subject of hidden mother photography to be presented in the U.S.—which traveled from 2014-16 to Blue Sky Gallery, Palmer Museum of Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, and Kennedy Museum of Art. Her second book, City of Incurable Women, was published in 2022 by Saint Lucy Books. She is the recipient of grants from Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council and the New York Foundation of the Arts, and of residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Larson is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography.
Christine Hume is the author of five books of poetry and prose, most recently Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Ohio State University Press, 21st Century Essays Series, 2023), and many limited edition chapbooks. With Anna Maria Hong, she co-edited Traversals: A Folio on Walking, for The Hopkins Review and has edited two features for American Book Review, on #MeToo and Girlhood. She is the 2025-2026 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library and has received residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, Ragdale, Wildacres, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Image Text Ithaca, and Valaparaiso. Hume teaches in the Creative Writing and the College in Prison programs at Eastern Michigan University.
All the Women I Know
by Christine Hume and Laura Larson
Co-published with np:
ISBN 978-1-962365-16-1