Clarence John Laughlin Archive
Through his dreamlike black-and-white images, the surrealist Louisiana photographer explored, amplified, and commented on the mystique of the South.
The Historic New Orleans Collection is the primary repository for the photographs and writings of pioneering surrealist and experimental photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905–1985). The Clarence John Laughlin Archive chronicles an an active career that stretched from the early 1930s through the late 1960s. Included are master prints, work prints, unique collages, and color experiments, as well as numerous pieces of correspondence and texts Laughlin wrote to accompany his images.
Throughout his work, Laughlin probed the intersection of fantasy and reality. His subjects, compositions, and photographic techniques all work toward evoking the inner meaning suggested by people, objects, and architecture. Laughlin had a romantic appreciation for Louisiana plantations, churches, and cemeteries, particularly those worn by time and nature. This theme is most apparent in Ghosts Along the Mississippi (1948), his second and mostly widely acclaimed book. Other recurring subjects include American Victorian architecture, contemporary architecture, interpretive photographic renditions of sculpture, and the subconscious.
After his photographic activity slowed in the early 1970s, Laughlin devoted his time to printing and organizing his collection, enjoying his 30,000-volume library, and continuing his writing, which he considered as much his vocation as his photography. Using an index card system, he curated his images into 20 named groups, including “Lost New Orleans,” “Mystery of Space,” and “Forms of Today.” Many of the cards include interpretive text Laughlin wrote to accompany the images.
Laughlin pursued experimental techniques, using double exposures or layering negatives during the developing process. He has been recognized as one of the progenitors of American surrealist photography, and his photographs and writings from groups such as “Images of the Lost,” “Visual Poems,” and “Satires” illustrate this aspect of his work.
Here, in a strange dark world, distilled from an ugly and shabby showcase, emerges a kind of hyper-reality . . . all resulting in the most convincingly “real” unrealness.
Laughlin’s text accompanying this image captures his fascination with everyday dualities—the extraordinary and the mundane, beauty and ugliness, reality and unreality. He filed this image under Groups F: Glass Magic, H: Lost New Orleans, and I: Satires.
An especially valuable part of the Laughlin Archive is the artist’s voluminous correspondence file with artists, educators, museum personnel, publishers, magazine editors, and friends. Because he felt that living in the Deep South isolated him from artistic mainstreams, Laughlin became an indefatigable letter writer. The file contains not only incoming letters but also carbon copies of all his own letters. HNOC surveyed the artist’s life in letters in the 2016–17 exhibition Clarence John Laughlin and His Contemporaries: A Picture and a Thousand Words.
Image galleries from several of Laughlin’s named groups follow.
Group H: Lost New Orleans
Group L: Poems of Desolation; or, Poems of the Interior World
Group M: Louisiana Plantations
Research Tools
Laughlin Photographs in the Louisiana Digital Library
Nearly 3,000 images from HNOC’s Clarence John Laughlin Archive are available to view in the Louisiana Digital Library, a free online catalog of images from institutions across the state.
More From Our Holdings
Collection Highlights
Dive into the Collection’s holdings with image-rich previews of treasures from New Orleans history.
Related Books
Louisiana Lens: Photographs from the Historic New Orleans Collection
by John H. Lawrence
with a foreword by Jeff L. Rosenheim
Related Exhibitions
Clarence John Laughlin and His Contemporaries: A Picture and a Thousand Words
Letters, artworks, and more illuminate the life and times of the experimental photographer.
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