Clarence john laughlin documentary
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Strange Light: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin
The Bat, 1940
The Bat, 1940
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1981.93The Bat was modeled by Laughlin’s wife, Elizabeth Heintzen, posing in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. Heintzen stands as the mysterious central figure within the catacombs, draped all in black. Her head is hidden as she clings to the cracks in the walls at her sides. Laughlin described the symbols behind this piece: “In the abbey of make-believe, the image of hypocrisy appropriately appears concealing its head as with those who hypocritically hide their heads from the facts they don’t want to acknowledge.”
The Enigma, 1941
The Enigma, 1941
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase, 75.76These tall Corinthian columns are all that remains of Windsor Plantation of Port Gibson, Mississippi. The home was burned first during the Civil War and then again mysteriously in 1890. The clouds above the columns form a question mark above the structure’s ruins. For
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“My gradually evolved conviction that the camera could be used as an instrument to explore the mind of man, the inner world where man lives both by symbols and emotions, and that in achieving this, the camera would have been used in such a way that it became a direct extension of the luminous and super-sentient eye of the imagination – a third eye!”[1]
Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985) was a writer, artist, photographer, and book collector from New Orleans, Louisiana. Credited as the first surrealist photographer in the United States, Laughlin is best known for his images of the American South and the publication Ghosts Along the Mississippi. He amassed an eclectic library of over 33,000 books intended to inform and enhance the creation of art. His love for books and literature started around age seven after a trip to the public library with his father. Fairy tales, like the Arabian Nights, fed his active imagination and incited a never-ending fascination with the fantastic.
His father’s death during the flu epi
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Clarence John Laughlin was one of New Orleans’s most renowned twentieth-century photographers and, at the same time, among the least understood. While some consider his work to be the epitome of romance, others see it as surrealist, fantasist, or symbolist. Some photos depict fantasy yet are seemingly straightforward documentary images. Elements of all of these leanings can be found in Laughlin’s work, which sprang primarily from his love for New Orleans and Louisiana and from his desire, as he wrote, to create “purely visual poetry.”
Born August 10, 1905, in Lake Charles, Laughlin moved to New Orleans with his family as a young child and lived there for most of his life. His father is credited with instilling in him a deep love of books and literature, and he became an ardent bibliophile. After teaching himself photography, Laughlin landed a position with the Works Progress Administration’s Historic American Building Survey during the Depression. His early career also included photographic work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Office of Strategic Services, and Vogue m
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