"In it [the series Poems of Desolation ] I have 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. By means of a complex integration of human figures (never presented as individuals, since the figures are intended only as symbols of states of mind); carefully chosen backgrounds; and selected objects; I attempted to project the symbolic reality of our time, so that the pictures become images of the psychological substructure of confusion, want and fear which have lead to to great world wars, and which may lead to the end of human society...."

Laughlin, through his datacard, continues with an explanation of the genesis of his artistic method: "But the pictures were not conceived in a coldly conscious way. They were arrived at mostly by means of subconscious intuitions and compulsions; and thus they have a number of different levels of meaning.

With the writing of the captions, Laughlin brings his underlying ideas full circle. His captions amount to a critique or a coming to terms with his own inner consciousness, and the forces and ideas that shaped him and his photographs.
Laughlin's literary influences are a strange mixture, a gumbo of sensibility appropriate for a man raised in the cross fertilization of cultures that is Southern Louisiana. His early reading included fairy stories and fantasy. As he matured he continued to absorb what ever his thirsty mind was offered, all banking the fires of his developing imagination. With his father's death when he was thirteen, young Clarence found himself responsible for providing for his mother and sister, gave up his dream of a formal education. He quit school, and went to work. During this difficult time he retreated further and further into his sanctuary of books and ideas. Much of his philosophy came haphazardly. Random and decidedly, non-academic and non-systematic his inquiry lead him to a diverse hodgepodge of voices that found a resonance in his search for identity and self meaning. Many of these voices were self-educated primitives, like himself, whose open minds free of academic objectivity were not contaminated or suspect. Among these were Charles Hoy Fort whose mystical view of reality found fertile ground in an imagination that sought a more profound meaning in everyday appearance. Laughlin's reading of the Bragdon's, The Forth Dimension , shaped his sense of time as as nonlinear construct that appears in many of his photographs. "Dislocation of a Figure#1,"Fig. 14 is an example of this construct given visual form. Past, present and future are represented in the distortion of space into multiple refractions.

Perhaps his most satisfying agreement in terms of philosophy came through his readings of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Laughlin and Baudelaire's shared "the ancient belief in correspondences--the doctrine that their exist inherent and systematic analogies between the human mind and the outer world, and also between the natural and spiritual worlds. As Baudelaire put this doctrine: 'Everything, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual as in the natural world, is significative, reciprocal, converse, correspondent.'" (Abrams 209) As Davis points out: "Laughlin was drawn to some of the poet's rhetorical devices and images....Baudelaire's "realistic" literary description of symbolic subjects suggests Laughlin's own combination of allegorical figure and relatively "straight" photo graphic techniques." (14). This association is clarified best in the extended series of photographs entitled "Poems of Desolation." Fig.1-9. It is interesting that Baudelaire's poetry and ideas borrowed much of their Symbolist polemic from the example of another American poet, Edgar Allan Poe. It is ironic that the leading photographer to explore the subconscious in the twentieth century, had to gain his influence, second hand, through a European filter when that influence was bred of an imagination peculiar to late 19th Century American romantics poets. Laughlin identified himself very closely with these poets. He regarded himself as an "extreme romantic", and not some up, goddamn, to the minute abstract photographer."(Laughlin, The Personal Eye 14). There is no doubt that his photographs are evidence of uniquely American reaction to the symbolist ideas. Only in the new world could these ideas find the unchecked germination in the fertility of the vast unclaimed sprawl of virgin nature of 19th Century America. The importance of Laughlin's environment to his vision is inescapable. Perhaps, in no other place in this country but Louisiana and particularly the city of New Orleans, with its diversity of cultures and custom and its luxuriant manifestation of nature, could the magical landscapes exist, fertile enough, for Laughlin's ideas and philosophy to germinate, take root and flourish.

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. (Leighten 145)

The result of this pre-sensitization is a juxtaposition of elements that reveal through the photograph a subconscious meanings. The juxtaposition is usually with objects found in the immediate setting and not arbitrarily combined for effect, such as with the photographs of Jerry Uelsmann. This points up the seriousness of Laughlin's intention to reveal his underlying ideas through the external reality or commonplace world. To him the two are inexorably linked. He has not simply made up fictions that illustrate an idea. The idea that arises out of the shooting process is something he recognized when it presents itself, but only after it does. Like the automatic painters, his shooting process uncovered ideas in the shapes of his subjects. In this sense, the objects in the so-called real world become abstractions for hidden concrete ideas he seeks to uncover with his imagination. The so-called surface reality becomes a mirror into his inner world. Thus, the schematic of his process of making a photograph proceeded like this: A underlying belief system into the nature of reality; an improvised arrangement of subject matter in the setting he found it; and a further explanation (the data cards) of what he has discovered in the process of making the particular photograph.

Laughlin's literary subtext makes these photographs, not simply portrayals of the surface world, bright and fuzzy, but snapshots of the underlying, subconscious world, balanced tediously between sleep and waking, the unseen and the seen, just out of reach, around the next corner, precipitated by the shadowy drive of anxiety and fear. Likewise, their purpose is not to create an imaginary world where fictions give insight into the human condition. These photographs were intended to reveal complex philosophical ideas that Laughlin was unable to express in a purely literary form. Like simple drawings in a book that extend our experience of the written explanation, Laughlin's photographs enlarge our understanding with a multi leveled disclosure that seeks through our faculty of sight to communicate his complex social, intellectual, and spiritual meanings .

In conclusion, A. D. Coleman has said: "Laughlin is one of a very small handful of expressive photographers who have not only articulated their obsessions but have been able to to create encompassing and unified mythologies which structure and give meanings to their visions." (162) Affixing a label to an artist of such dynamic and contradictory power, of such volatile expression and personality is a lot like dancing on the head of a pin, it might easily require a bargain with the devil. Categorization of Clarence in his lifetime would have been equal to that bargain. His work is clearly his own , its reliance on literary content is similar to the Symbolist painters and poets, and his underlying philosophy very much 'like' theirs. Unlike the Symbolists, the story he tells in his photographs and their captions is his own. But for all of Laughlin rejection of Modernity, he is the quintessential modern consciousness, isolated seeking connection. Despite his enviable argument to the contrary his romantic posture seems like his draped figures and phantoms, a mere personification, for a voice and eye running as fast as he can to keep from oblivion, his roots, his history, lost to the enigma of time that his art so perfectly exposed. So out of respect for Clarence, no labels, just his pictures and his "words" that are looking and speaking for themselves.

Bookhardt, D. Eric. "The Magic World Clarence John Laughlin." The Times Picayune Dixie 11 Apr. 1982: 9-10.

Coleman, A. D. Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings 1968-1978. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Davis, Keith F. "A Forest of Symbols:The Early work of Clarence John Laughlin." Clarence John Laughlin:Visionary Photographer: Kansas City: Hallmark Cards, Inc, 1990.

Lawrence, John H. "Clarence John Laughlin's Poems of the Interior World: A Philosophy in Photographs." Clarence John Laughlin:Visionary Photographer: Kansas City: Hallmark Cards, Inc, 1990.

Leighten, Patricia. "Clarence John Laughlin: Art and Thought of an American Surrealist." History of Photography. p.145.

Laughlin, Clarence John. Ghosts Along the Mississippi,1948. New York: Crown Publishers, Bonanza Books,1962.

Laughlin, Clarence John. Clarence John Laughlin: The Personal Eye. New York: Aperture Inc.,1973.

Laughlin, Clarence John. Lost Louisiana: An Essay in the Poetry of Remembrance. Unpublished ms,1973, Manuscript Division, Historic New Orleans Collection.

Smith, Henry Holmes. "An Access of American Sensibility:The Photographs of Clarence John Laughlin." Center For Creative Photography ser.10. October 1979: 15-20.

Starr, S. Frederick. "The Larger World of Clarence John Laughlin." Arts Quarterly [New Orleans Museum of Art] Jan.-Mar.1981: 22-25.

Williams, Johnathan. "The Shadow of His Equipage." Clarence John Laughlin: The Personal Eye. New York: Aperture Inc.,1973.

Fig. 1 The Appearance of the Anonymous Man. 1949

Fig. 2 Where Shall We Go? 1940

Fig. 3 We Reached for Our Dead Hearts. 1941

Fig. 4 The Elder Worship. 1949

Fig. 5 The Ego-Centrics. 1940

Fig. 6 The Unborn. 1941

Fig. 7 We Are Alone. 1940

Fig. 8 Figure with Iron Flames. 1940

Fig . 9 The Masks Grow To Us. 1947

Fig. 10 The Eye That Never Sleeps. 1946

Fig. 11 Bird of The Death Dream. 1953

Fig. 12 The Insect Headed Tombstone. 1953

Fig. 13 The Unending Stream. 1941

Fig. 14 Dislocation of a Figure#1 1941

Websites About Clarence John Laughlin

A Few of Clarence John Laughlin's Photographs and an Exerpt from his "The Third World of Photography" are available Online at Surrealist's Group of Wisconsin Web Site

Locations Significant in the Life and Photographs of Clarence John Laughlin

The Pontalba Apartments overlook Jackson Square on two sides. These apartments are typical New Orleans delapidation extraordinaire. Built in the 1700s, they are hard to rent as there is a waiting list for years. Here the infamous Clarence John Laughlin lived with his wife during the 40s when he photographed the plantation homes along the Mississippi River in his own decadent and over-the-top quasi-surrealist style.
Photo & Caption Contributed by Howard Smith