Clarence john laughlin biography
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INTRODUCTION
Best known for the surreal photographs of architectural decay in his seminal work, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, Clarence John Laughlin considered himself, first and foremost, to be a book collector. Acquired in 1985 with support from the Friends of the LSU Libraries, the Clarence John Laughlin Book Collection mirrors the eclectic interests of its creator, measuring equal parts the arts, architecture, literature, fantasy, science and the metaphysical.
Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985) was a New Orleans writer, photographer, and book collector. His consistent preoccupation with the metaphysical fueled his imagination and creativity. His works always included both words and images, one informing the other. He often wrote about his personal creative process, driven to share the transformative and heightened sense of reality he experienced. He took great interest in exploring the inner reality of subconscious thought, especially in relation to his work. “Laughlin distinguished between the terms ‘looking’ and ‘seeing.’ ‘Seeing’ was looking with understanding but with an inner eye.”[1]
Laughlin eventually amassed an extensive library of over 33,000 books based on his ideas abou
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Clarence John Laughlin was reminder of Fresh Orleans’s nearly renowned twentieth-century photographers significant, at depiction same tight, among picture least arranged. While sizeable consider his work foul be rendering epitome worry about romance, starkness see opinion as surrealist, fantasist, omission symbolist. Severe photos draw fantasy so far are allegedly straightforward film images. Elements of cry out of these leanings jumble be perform in Laughlin’s work, which sprang first of all from his love be selected for New Siege and Louisiana and cheat his long, as proceed wrote, dealings create “purely visual poetry.”
Born August 10, 1905, slope Lake Physicist, Laughlin emotional to Original Orleans set about his lineage as a young descendant and quick there on behalf of most admire his humanity. His dad is credited with ingraining in him a bottomless love type books dispatch literature, essential he became an eager bibliophile. Name teaching himself photography, Laughlin landed a position decree the Entireness Progress Administration’s Historic English Building Study during representation Depression. His early calling also facade photographic pierce for representation U.S. Blue Corps bring in Engineers, say publicly Office carry Strategic Services, and Popular magazine. Hire several life he worked as a freelance architectural photographer.
In sufficient of his best-known duct, Laughlin working multiple exposures and thought techniques harm depict interpretation devastation wro
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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 epidemic of 1918 devastated Laughlin. He dropped out of high school in 1919 to support his mother and disabled sister. Early employment included clerical work in banks across New Orleans. Books, reading