Born during World War II, Laura Rous spent part of her childhood in a Japanese internment camp in Java (Indonesia), which was then still under Dutch colonial rule. Despite the harsh conditions of her captivity, the artist recalled developing a vivid imagination and an “eye for the insignificant” from an early age. At six, she lost her father, a prisoner of war held by the Japanese army, and moved with her family to the Netherlands, where she completed her schooling. She later became a model, an experience that introduced her to photography and its staging. In the late 1960s, she attended the Famous Photographers Academy in Brussels before enrolling in cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. However, she drops out her studies to travel and work in the field alongside her husband, Hans Samsom (1939–2024), also a photographer. Together, they undertook several assignments in Indonesia and Japan, including In den Beginne [In the Beginning, 1972], a partially autobiographical project featuring a multi-screen photography installation and a book, commissioned by the cruise company Holland America Line.

L. Samsom Rous’s solo career as a photographer truly took off in the 1980s, in both the Netherlands and the United States. She first showcased her work in In My View (1982), a group exhibition of Dutch photographers held at KLM Plaza in New York. She worked in a studio in Amsterdam, where she developed her photographs and conducted various assignments for the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam and the United Nations, such as a series of children’s portraits commissioned by Unicef. She presented her series Portraits of Portraits (1982–1983) at the Amsterdam Photo ’84 group exhibition (1984) at Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk [New Church], which drew wider attention to her work. That same year, she won an award at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles for her New York portraits.

In 1985, L. Samsom Rous held her first solo exhibition at the Canon Gallery in Amsterdam, presenting a selection of portraits and landscapes. She later travelled to South Africa, where she shot A Secret Love Affair (1990), a series depicting white infants with their Black nannies and elderly white individuals with their Black caregivers. At the Melkweg gallery in Amsterdam, the artist presented a series on twins in her solo exhibition Gemini (1995). The same series would later be displayed at the Double Vie, Double Vue exhibition (1996) at the Fondation Cartier, alongside works by Diane Arbus (1923–1971), Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895–1989) and Claude Cahun (1894–1954) amongst others.

In 2003, the Samsoms presented Tree of Forgetfulness (2003), a photographic series tracing the historical routes of the transatlantic slave trade, from Benin to Suriname and the Netherlands. The project’s title refers to a colonial ritual in Benin, in which enslaved people were forced to walk a circle around the eponymous tree to symbolise the abandonment of their past and identity before their deportation to the Americas. In Suriname the artists followed the route to the village of Tutubuka, where they photographed Maroon communities, the direct descendants of enslaved people who managed to escape colonial plantations. They also documented the large Surinamese population that had settled in the Netherlands as part of post-colonial migration.

L. Samsom Rous captures portraits with raw authenticity, free from artifice or embellishment, yet imbued with striking intensity. Her subjects, often marked by a sense of gravity, stand out through their deep, contemplative gazes, while their poses balance pride and restraint. With remarkable precision, the photographer unveils both the inner strength and quiet reserve of her models, as if her lens could penetrate their most intimate worlds. Her works are mostly found in public collections in the Netherlands, including those of the Museum Arnhem (Arnhem), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam).