Laura Wilson (photographer)

Laura Cunningham Wilson is an American photographer. Her photographs have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, Wallpaper, Washington Post Magazine, and London's Sunday Times Magazine. She has completed five books of photography and text: Watt Matthews of Lambshead (1989), Hutterites of Montana (2000), Avedon at Work: In the American West (2003), Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football (2003) and That Day: Pictures in the American West (2015).

Wilson was born Laura Cunningham and raised in Massachusetts, the daughter of Rosemary (née White) and Edward J. Cunningham.

She has completed five books of photography and text. Watt Matthews of Lambshead (1989) is a photographic essay about one of the last Texas cattlemen. In Matthews' obituary, The New York Times wrote that the book has become “a classic of Texas history.” Hutterites of Montana (2000) documents the Hutterite communities of the American west. Avedon at Work: In the American West (2003) is a portrait of photographer Richard Avedon (for whom Wilson worked as an assistant) showing his creative process, working methods, and range of subjects as he worked to complete In the American West. Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football (2003) documents six-man football and its culture in small Texas towns. That Day: Pictures in the American West (2015) photographs in the American west accompanied by Wilson's observations at the time each photograph was taken. Larry McMurtry wrote, "Laura Wilson has an ever-searching eye for the bleak beauty of the west- and for it's bleak reality too. That Day is a remarkable book."

Wilson has lectured on photography at Harvard University, the International Center of Photography in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the University of Texas at Austin.

She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Philosophical Society of Texas. She serves on the board of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

Wilson is married to Robert A. Wilson. They live in Dallas, Texas and are the parents of three sons, actors Andrew, Owen, and Luke, and grandparents to four grandchildren through Andrew and Owen.

• Watt Matthews of Lambshead. Texas State Historical Association, 1989. ISBN 0876110901.
• Hutterites of Montana. Yale University Press, 2000. ISBN 0300083394.
• Avedon at Work: In the American West. University of Texas Press, 2003. ISBN 0292701934.
• Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football. Bright Sky Press, 2003. ISBN 1931721289.
• That Day: Pictures in the American West. Yale University Press, 2015. ISBN 9780300215397.

In September 2005, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas mounted an exhibition of Wilson's photographs from Avedon at Work.

Photographs from the book Grit & Glory were exhibited in the Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University in 2011.

That Day: Laura Wilson was presented at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art from September 5, 2015 – February 14, 2016.