In 1893 she began her art studies at the California School of Design in the Mark Hopkins Institute and left in 1899 to open her own photographic studio in the Flood Building.

In February 1902 she sold her studio to Berkeley photographer Adelaide Hanscom and traveled in the Southwest with her fiancé Sidney Armer.

The pace of her exhibitions accelerated with a display at the Oakland Art Fund of her bookplate designs and prints, which Anne Brigman called "exquisite", and contributions to the American Photographic Salons in New York City and Washington, D.C.[5][6] She returned from a trip to Tahiti in October 1905 and shortly thereafter her infant daughter died.

Laura won a silver medal at Seattle's Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in 1909 and began to experiment with color photography in her popular Berkeley studio.

[4] A turning point in her career came in 1919–20 when she began to document systematically the Hopi and Navajo of the Southwest, which resulted in numerous publications on their societies, art (especially sand paintings), and folklore, as well as hundreds of photographs and the film The Mountain Chant (1928).