The next Artist You Need To Know is Clarence John Laughlin (1905 – 1985).
Laughlin was an American photographer best known for his monochromatic, haunting and ethereal images that were predominantly of the American South. He has been called “The Father of American Surrealism” and is recognized as the most significant photographer in not just the Southern United States but was also an important figure within the nascent (at that time) but growing realm of the American school of photography (though he often was conceptually and formally in opposition to the prevalent trends of his peers).
“Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.” (from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, from the accompanying text for the 2019 exhibition Strange Light: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin)
“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.”
Laughlin was born into a middle-class family in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1905. His childhood was tumultuous. His family relocated to New Orleans in 1910 (after they suffered a major financial loss) where his father took a job in a factory. Laughlin was a quiet child with few friends but had a close and loving relationship with his father who was encouraging of his son’s interest in literature and art. His father’s death in 1918 was very difficult for Laughlin, and he would drop out of high school shortly after, having just completed a single year.
However, Laughlin was an impressively self educated person, and was known for being highly literate with a love of language that had grown since his childhood. Many of his images were accompanied by erudite and often elaborate captions he wrote himself and he – throughout his life – produced many poems and short stories, strongly influenced by French symbolism. Regrettably, most have never been published, but it can be asserted that his images often have a narrative quality and are fine encapsulations of his memories, Southern heritage and voracious and considered reading habits. He often, in his writings, spoke of “the connection between photography and imagination.” (from here)
“Laughlin’s work is often called surreal because of his ghostly double exposures . . . or his signature use of those shadowy figures of desire and fear that haunt his photographs of the graves and ruined plantations of Louisiana.” (from here)
He was a self-taught photographer. At the age of 25 he began using a 2½ by 2¼ view camera and found work as a freelance photographer (specifically in architectural photography, which makes sense considering the landscape of the city of New Orleans with its rich and diverse history in that sphere).
Laughlin did work as a Civil Service photographer with the U.S. Engineer Corps for a time, documenting construction and other industrial activities. He was also employed in Washington, D.C., as an Assistant Photographer at the National Archives, during this period. Laughlin also worked as a freelance photographer with a variety of agencies (primarily in New York City), including Vogue but conflicts with an editor – the renowned Edward Steichen – at Vogue, and a disdain for the rigid constraints of many of these projects led Laughlin to leave these positions and focus primarily on his own creative projects. This coincided with his return to New Orleans in 1946, and he would rarely leave for the rest of his life.
From here : “His images are often nostalgic, reflecting the influence of Eugène Atget, among others, who tried to capture disappearing urban landscapes.”
Laughlin has also been irreverently, but with appreciation, called “Edgar Allan Poe with a camera.” This is fitting, as many of his photographs evoke Poe’s assertion that “there is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion.”
But these formal elements that marked his early ventures into photography can be seen at play in his images, just expanded or challenged within his personal style. His choices regarding equipment and his skills grew over the next few decades, as did his vision : some of his images played upon simple geometric abstractions of the architectural character of New Orleans while others were more elaborately staged scenes replete with models, costumes and props. Laughlin often worked with Dody Weston Thompson as a model and she would go on to be a significant photographer as well.
Laughlin was prolific in documenting and interpreting the world around him : he shot more than 2,000 negatives of New Orleans’ French Quarter alone, as an ongoing testament to its “eerie beauty” but also as an example of his ongoing desire to capture the contested narratives of history, society and memory that define the place in both physical and conceptual zones in his photographs.
In 1948, he published a book of his photographs titled Ghosts Along the Mississippi: The Magic of the Old Houses of Louisiana. The images were primarily of plantation-era Southern architecture, speaking again to both individual and collective memory in terms of the mythology and ghosts, if you will, of the Southern United States. He wrote that architecture “…is the one art most completely involved with human lives.” (from here) It can also be said that architecture is often the most abstract form of art, and thus is more immediately and necessarily defined by the people who inhabit its spaces.
From the High Art Gallery : “From double exposures to collage to making photographs without a camera, Laughlin pushed the possibilities of photography to their technical limits. Throughout [his career] Laughlin’s varied disruptions to the typical photographic process are fully demonstrated. Experimentation was quite popular in European art circles, while the American school of photography at the time was primarily concerned with the camera’s propensity for recording the “truth.” Laughlin’s stark divergence from this method put him at odds with the curators and artists who otherwise might have championed his more straightforward architectural images. Despite his outsider position for much of his life, Laughlin found great success in the 1970s and ’80s when artists and photographers began to embrace experimentation with the medium and favor of more expressive and abstract works.”
In 1967, Laughlin’s arthritis impeded his ability to take photographs and so he turned his attention to organizing his archive of over 17,000 photos and negatives.
Laughlin passed away in 1985, in New Orleans : his estate comprised a huge collection, both of the aforementioned negatives but many books and other artworks. A direct result of this is that his work continues to be shown around the United States and Europe, as many of his negatives are printed and the images disseminated for the first time. His library, comprising over 30,000 volumes, was purchased by Louisiana State University in 1986.
Laughlin is buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery (this site is host to a number of graves of significant individuals in the space of arts and culture, and one can’t but imagine that his ghost would enjoy photographing the many sculptures and other architectural follies within that graveyard – or perhaps become one of the ghostly figures of his own photographs that might appear in other images taken there…).
This may seem a bit fanciful, but Laughlin always believed that “photography could radically transform even the most commonplace natural forms into something fantastical.” (from here)
As previously stated, Clarence John Laughlin was a very prolific photographer, and what we’ve shared is just the tip of the iceberg as concerns his photographic career. Much more about his life and his artworks can be enjoyed here and here.
A documentary about the artist – titled Clarence John Laughlin: An Artist with a Camera – was produced in 2009 : you can watch an excerpt from that here. Another film about Laughlin’s art and aesthetic titled The Phantasmagorical Clarence John Laughlin can be enjoyed here.