Laughlin Clarence John

(b Lake Charles, LA, 14 Aug 1905; d New Orleans, LA, 2 Jan 1985).

American photographer. He spent his early childhood on a plantation in Louisiana before moving to New Orleans in 1910. A self-taught photographer, he began photographing in 1935, influenced by Baudelaire and French Symbolist poets. Initially imitating the objective photography of contemporaries Paul Strand and Edward Weston, he came to believe in the pursuit of his own visions and by 1939 considered his life’s work begun. Laughlin photographed what he came to describe as ‘the third world of photography’, concentrating on the remnants of the ‘Old South’; he produced images of crumbling plantations, graveyards and shadowy figures, visual parallels to novels by such writers as William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. He posed veiled women to represent spirits bearing the weight of history and often used double exposure and contrasts of light and shadow to invest inanimate objects with fearful possibilities, or to increase illusionistic possibilities—as in In the Cage (1940), an image of a child behind a louvre-door, the shadows cast on him like bars of a cage. A work such as Moss Monster (1946) demonstrates his ability to turn natural phenomena into a Surrealist image.

Laughlin Clarence John



             

1938


 

1938

1940

1940

1941

1941
    

1941
     

1941

1947

1954