Born in Pforsheim in Germany, Lisa Rothschild sailed on 28th October 1939 on board the S.S. Veendam from Antwerp to the United States as a teenager where she graduated early from college at just 17.
[3] However she picked up political stories; a Brooklyn police inquiry,[4] 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 Larsen as “Mona Lisa,”); and the McCarthy rally of November 29, 1954, in Madison Square Garden, at which the crowd booed at the mention of The New York Times, and when Larsen entered, who was by then well-known, a near-riot erupted and while police escorted her from the hall, a voice shouted 'Hang the Communist bitch!
'[5] Fluent in French, English, German and speaking some Danish and Russian, Larsen was assigned international stories from the early 1950s; Iran’s Premier Mohammed Mossadegh from his New York hospital bed, where she photographed him during the 1951 Iranian oil dispute with Great Britain, invited her to visit Iran for a two weeks in 1952 to photograph in Isfahan, Qom, Persepolis, and Shiraz; photographing Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly (1953); Queen Elizabeth II’s first royal tour; and 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.
[3] A photograph from the latter 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.
[6][7] At the 1955 Bandung Conference promoting ties between Africa and Asia in Indonesia which Larson covered with Howard Sochurek,[8] she used a small portable tape recorder and two Leica cameras,[9] and was often mentioned in the local press as an object of popular admiration.
[10][11][12] 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.
[16] 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.