"He has been a photojournalist for the San Francisco Chronicle for 22 years. Like most staff shooters for a major metropolitan paper, he covered everything from fires to football, shootings to weather, earthquakes to celebrities in my daily assignments.
Larson has received numerous awards and his works have been included in eight books. But his most satisfying photography has been the documentary work undertaken in the past few years -- stories developed on my own.
It is through his documentary work that he has met people who have inspired him and given his work a new passion, people of unwavering spirit and determination despite, in some cases, the most horrific situations.
Larson's documentary work of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings resulted in being named a 1989 Pulitzer Prize finalist. It also won him the highest honor in the Associated Press Sweepstakes award from the news executive council of California and Nevada, and was the heart of his portfolio that earned him the California Press Photographer of the Year for 1989. Larson was able to document their struggles even today, nearly 50 years after the bombings, because he won a grant through the Hibakusha Travel Grant Program, the first photojournalist to ever win that grant. That story inspired him to do a photo story on people who are allergic to the world, a condition known as environmental illness.
After spending a year on the project, Larson was named a finalist twice for the Eugene E. Smith World Understanding Award, an international grant for documentary photographers. That photo story, along with a series documenting life on the toughest streets in San Francisco, the Tenderloin, once again won him the title California Press Photographer of the year for 1990.
Another award-winning series Larson did followed a year in the life of a woman who had Alzheimer's disease, and the husband who refused to turn her over to a nursing home but was eventually forced to. That story was particularly touching for him because his own grandmother, suffering from the same disease, had just left her home for a convalescent home.
While the recognition and awards Larson received for his photography have been nice, they are, of course, not the reason he got into photojournalism nor why he continues to do what he does. The stories Larson has documented and hopes to continue documenting are those that might make a difference in our lives -- even if it does no more than get one person to think about something he or she might never have cared to think about before.
Larson's first introduction to photojournalism was through a neighbor in his suburban Chicago home, a sports editor for United Press International who let a wide-eyed youth watch his sports heroes from the sidelines. The seed was planted by him and grew under the guidance of a 45-year veteran of United Press International in San Francisco who saw some of Larson's potential.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in radio and television from San Francisco State University in 1975 and completing his military service during the Vietnam era, Larson began working as a stringer for UPI."