Photographer’s Profile of the Day… Clarence John Laughlin

Dec 5

by Gerald Boerner

“Your pictures are not waiting to be looked at–they are looking.”
— Josef Albers

"I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer….this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts."
— Clarence John Laughlin

“Clarence Laughlin remained, like the title of one of his best-known photographs, an enigma.”
— John H. Lawrence, in Haunter of Ruins

“It should be possible for even the photographer – just as for the creative poet of painter – to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

“It therefore should be possible for even the photographer – just as for the creative poet or painter – to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

“In old grimy streets, in isolated and decaying houses, sometimes far from the Vieux Carre, in little used and secluded cemeteries, there still sluggishly circulates the ebbing blood of the past, of a vigorous and vividly hued past.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

“There is nothing, under present conditions, that can be more easily and exactly reproduced than a technically good black-and-white photograph, and it is utter rot to burden those interested in them with irrelevant biographical trivia and pet longwinded theory.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

“In our society, most of us wear protective masks of various kinds and for various reasons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

“Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

“I attempt, through much of my work, to animate all things—even so-called “inanimate” objects–with the spirit of man. I have come, by degrees, to realize that this extremely animistic projection rises, ultimately, from my profound fear and disquiet over the accelerating mechanization of man’s life; and the resulting attempts to stamp out individuality in all spheres of man’s activity–this whole process being one of the dominant expressions of our military-industrial society. The creative photographer sets free the human contents of objects; and imparts humanity to the inhuman world around him.”
— Clarence John Laughlin

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation site, PhotoQuotes.com, which does not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting were obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Wikipedia.com web site or from the Masters-of-Photography.com web site which did not state any restrictions on their use. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

Clarence John Laughlin (1905 – 1985)

Clarence John Laughlin was a United States photographer best known for his surrealist photographs of the U.S. South.

Laughlin was born in to a middle class family in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His rocky childhood, southern heritage, and interest in literature influenced his work greatly. After losing everything in a failed rice-growing venture in 1910, his family was forced to relocate to New Orleans where Laughlin’s father found work in a factory. Laughlin was an introverted child with few friends and a close relationship with his father, who cultivated and encouraged his lifelong love of literature and whose death in 1918 devastated his son.

Although he dropped out of high school in 1920, after having barely completed his freshman year, Laughlin was an educated and highly literate man. His large vocabulary and love of language are evident in the elaborate captions he later wrote to accompany his photographs. He initially aspired to be a writer and wrote many poems and stories in the style of French symbolism, most of which remained unpublished.

Laughlin discovered photography when he was 25 and taught himself how to use a simple 2 1/2 by 2 1/4 view camera. He began working as a freelance architectural photographer and was subsequently employed by agencies as varied as Vogue Magazine and the US government. Disliking the constraints of government work, Laughlin eventually left Vogue after a conflict with then-editor Edward Steichen. Thereafter, he worked almost exclusively on personal projects utilizing a wide range of photographic styles and techniques, from simple geometric abstractions of architectural features to elaborately-staged allegories utilizing models, costumes, and props.

Many historians credit Laughlin as being the first true surrealist photographer in the United States. His images are often nostalgic, reflecting the influence of Eugene Atget and other photographers who tried to capture vanishing urban landscapes. Laughlin’s best known book, "Ghosts Along the Mississippi", was first published in 1948.

He died on January 2, 1985, leaving behind a massive collection of books and images. Thanks to the 17,000 negatives that he preserved, his work continues to be shown around the United States and Europe. Laughlin’s library, comprising over 30,000 volumes, was purchased by Louisiana State University in 1986.

His Approach to Photography

Clarence Laughlin remained, like the title of one of his best-known photographs, an enigma. Labeling him as such is no more or less accurate or useful than calling him a surrealist, a romantic, a modernist, or a fantasist, though each of these terms describes an aspect of Laughlin’s character and his achievements as a visual artist. To explain the mystery of Laughlin’s work would be not only presumptuous effrontery but quite possibly a fool’s errand, an enterprise doomed to failure. This omnium-gatherum of photographs, quotations, and essays serves not as an explanation of the enigma but a suggestion of its boundaries.

While he was still a young boy his family moved to New Orleans, and with the exception of a brief sojourn to New York in the early 1940s and time spent in Washington, D.C., during World War II, he remained a resident of the city, for virtually his entire life. His father introduced him to the world of children’s literature and fantasy through the public library in New Orleans, and the young Laughlin was fascinated with books from then on. His personal library at his death numbered some thirty, thousand volumes on subjects as varied as science fiction, Victorian erotica, contemporary Sculpture, and illustrated fairy tales, and included runs of avant-garde periodicals. The omnivorous (though never indiscriminate) range of Laughlin’s taste in books, magazines, and literature provided a self-constructed underpinning for his work in photography.

Like so many important aspects of his life, Laughlin’s career as a photographer was essentially of his own making. During the depths of the Great Depression, when he was approaching the age of thirty, he taught himself the fundamentals of the medium using simple cameras and home- made enlarging equipment. In the first ten years of his career, Laughlin was employed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Vogue and the Office of Strategic Services, but the two decades following World War II were strictly self-directed.

During this period, Laughlin earned a modest living as a freelance architectural photographer, receiving commissions from architects in the South and Midwest to photograph residences, power plants, hospitals, and office buildings that were the tangible manifestations and solid legacy of the postwar building boom. He supplemented this income by lecturing about his creative photographic work and theories at colleges and universities throughout the United States; he was also paid for the circulation of a series of traveling exhibitions based on thematic groupings of his work. Laughlin frequently took trips combining photographic commissions, lecture dates, and photography reflecting his personal interests. These journeys, invariably by train, could keep him away from New Orleans and his borrowed darkroom for weeks at a time. Upon his return, marathon sessions to develop and print work for clients and himself were the rule.

Classifying his Work

Laughlin describes the different categories of photos that he has taken over the years. In Clarence John Laughlin’s Descriptions of his Photographic Groups from Haunter of Ruins (see Masters of Photography web site reference below), Laughlin lists the following groupings of his œuvre. Selected descriptions are also included for some categories:

GROUP A: Still Lifes…
“Although this group originated in a desire to develop further an interest in composition (incited by the discovery of certain art magazines in the 1930s) it eventually became involved in an urge to see how far my feelings about objects could become projected through the camera; and in the discovery of objects which could become the clues to changes in the nature of American culture.”
GROUP B: Marine Forms…
GROUP C: Tree Forms…
“Its emphasis was not so much on the beauty of natural forms in themselves, as on the mysterious realm where natural forms intermingle significantly and strangely with projections from the mind of man.”
GROUP D: Early Industrialism…
“This group presents images of the gradual and confused impact of industrialism in the deep south. ”
GROUP E: Metal Magic…
GROUP F: Glass Magic…
“Glass is fascinating because it acts so variably and subtly with light: offers so may suggestions that so-called reality is not the simple thing we usually conceive it to be: that reality embodies many planes and many kinds of meanings.”
GROUP G: Fantasy in Old New Orleans…
“This special kind of fantasy appeared at one end of the scale in the unparalleled development of funereal art in the old burial grounds of the city; and at the other end of the scale (as a counterbalance, perhaps), in the wild fantasy of the Mardi Gras.”
GROUP H: Lost New Orleans…
“…I attempted to isolate visually the authentic quality of the old buildings of New Orleans – those buildings which had neither been prettified for the tourist trade nor "renovated" for commerce: of those streets in New Orleans which were "lost" in time.”
GROUP I: Satires…
“MY own efforts in this field are involved either with carefully arranged effects which attempt to transcend mere "contrivance"; or else exploit the accidental sardonic ‘juxtaposition of objects.”
GROUP J: The Images of the Lost…
“But the people were very seldom photographed where they were actually found. Instead, a difficult method was used: a special background was selected for each person (often from places discovered previously) with the intention of making the background work, not only in terms of design, but in terms of a subtle revelation of the overall social situation of the person.”
GROUP K: Visual Poems…
“Many of these pictures are examples of the interaction of photography and literature, using either carefully arranged whole figures, or highly individualized portrait effects in close-up; but always with poetic emphasis.”
GROUP L: Poems of the Interior World…
“In it I tried to create a mythology from our contemporary world. This mythology, instead of having gods and goddesses – has the personifications of our fears and frustrations, our desires and dilemmas. … In releasing the symbolic contents of objects my intent was to present settings for the drama of the misery and madness of our time; to deal with the depersonalization of man, and the conditions leading to the rise of the authoritarian ideologies.”
GROUP M: The Louisiana Plantations…
“The primary objectives of Group M are: (1) to outline the evolution of Louisiana plantation architecture from its origins under strong French provincial influence in the eighteenth century – to the onset of the Civil War; (2) to indicate how in the 1830s and 1840s a truly indigenous type of house appeared on the Louisiana plantation, which was unlike anything else in America, or in Europe, where the plan of the house grew out of the nature of the climate and of the materials.”
GROUP N: Forms of Today…
GROUP 0: Color Experiments…
“The primary objectives of Group M are: (1) to outline the evolution of Louisiana plantation architecture from its origins under strong French provincial influence in the eighteenth century – to the onset of the Civil War; (2) to indicate how in the 1830s and 1840s a truly indigenous type of house appeared on the Louisiana plantation, which was unlike anything else in America, or in Europe, where the plan of the house grew out of the nature of the climate and of the materials.”
GROUP P: Rock Forms…
“A study of the pictures, however, should indicate that the photographer varies the character of his approach in accordance with what the nature of the subject matter suggests to his imagination.”
GROUP Q: New Anatomies…
“…instead of giving us the results of direct vision, give us far more – the hyper-real vision created by the inner eye in man – the poetic, desiring, and dreaming eye. Because of this, the erotic element becomes all the more intense. But due to the puritanical code dominating this country till recently, none of these pictures have ever been published or exhibited before.”
GROUP R: Sculpture Seen Anew…
“…to outline some of the methods (and there are quite a variety of such methods developed in these pictures) by which the camera can be used to interpret sculpture – to intensify the experience of sculpture beyond the direct experience of the physical eye.”
GROUP S: The Magic of the Object…
“In this group I try to show how the photographer, like the painter and poet, can release a level of meaning from the most ordinary objects, which has nothing to do with their naturalistic meaning. …what the photographer is really dealing with is what the human mind has projected into the object: the secret language of inanimate objects, the hidden images of man’s hopes and Joys, his dreams and desires, by which he makes more human the inhuman world around him.”
GROUP T: The Mystery of Space…
“…how the photographer can deal with space problems in as real a sense as the painter, but without the help of color: how, for instance, the camera can collapse space (i.e., make a three-dimensional object look flat); or multiply space (i.e., make a two-dimensional object look three-dimensional).”
GROUP U: American Victorian Architecture…
“Among the objectives of this group were (1) to show that the 1880s and 90s were probably the most important period architecturally in American cultural history; (2) to show why a new evaluation of American Victorian buildings must be made; (3) to discover important new architectural material from this period, not in the books; (4) to show that the American Victorians had made some very important discoveries, Mostly by intuition, in the highly significant field which can be called "psychological functionalism" – which enabled them to understand the supremely important roles of fantasy and decoration in architecture in a manner far beyond anything we are capable of" – and led to many of their houses being far more human and livable than ours; (5) to show that it was little-known Victorian architects who first broke with European architectural traditions, rather than such people as Sullivan and Wright. ”
GROUP V: Vintage Prints…
GROUP W: Fantasy in Europe…
“So when I reached Paris for the first time in October 1965, and realized the incredible riches of photography that could easily be found on almost every,, street, and also realized my limited time, I quickly determined to restrict myself to the 1880s and 90s.”

Laughlin never intended his photographs to be his complete statement. The problem is that his images at their best are so striking, so evocative, so unique as to be considered seminal, that the attachment of his words seems redundant or over done. But, to dismiss the words, to exhibit the photographs without the artist’s critiques is to cut off from the work its intrinsic "raison d’etre". The making of photograph amounted to the discovery phase, the exploration for Laughlin. An exploration for a complex of meaning illuminated when the words and pictures are taken together. These images have a ragged intensity to them that suggests that despite their theatrical and staged appearance that they were improvised within the integrity of the setting or location he found them. In an interview before his death he spoke of his process of making a photograph:

You don’t go out and accidentally find something that’s going to make a good picture, but [instead, you find it] in yourself, knowing already what you want to do…at least subconsciously if not consciously; you find a thing in so-called nature or so-called reality which corresponds to this preconceived, this pre-sensitized, concept, which is hidden somewhere in your imagination or your subconscious…You go out and find what you are already prepared to see.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Clarence John Laughlin that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_John_Laughlin

Also see…

Masters of Photography: Clarence John Laughlin…
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/L/laughlin/laughlin.html

PhotoQuotes.com on Clarence John Laughlin…
http://www.photoquotes.com/ShowQuotes.aspx?id=193&name=Laughlin,Clarence%20John

Bookmark It