Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1986)

Laughlin, Clarence John
American, 1905-85

Clarence John Laughlin is [published prior to Laughlin's death in 1985] an extraordinarily prolific American surrealist photographer who has consistently produced disturbing and hauntingly beautiful images since the late 1930s. He has combined still-lifes, abstractions, architectural photos, and multiple exposures in an entirely original, romantic mystical synthesis which has influenced the last few generations of photographers and Jerry Uelsmann in particular.

Laughlin writes, "I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer. Whether for good or ill, this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts .... Through photography I have also tried to tie together and further my active interests in painting, in poetry, in psychology, and in architecture. Whatever value my photography has, it is only because of these other interests."

Laughlin was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He lived on a plantation neat New Iberia, and has spent most of his life since 1910 in New Orleans. He attended high school for one year in 1918. Obliged to support his family upon the death of his father, he worked at a variety of jobs between 1924 and 1935.

Laughlin's early interests were with the writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the French Symbolists, who inspired him to write prose poems and stories. He began to photograph in 1934, influenced by the work of Alfred Stleglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Man Ray, and Eugéne Atget. His first major project was the documentation of New Orleans architecture, privately and as a Civil Service photographer for the United States Engineer Corps in New Orleans from 1936 to 1941.

Laughlin's first one-man show was held at the Isaac Delgado Museum, New Orleans, in 1936. His New Orleans architectural work was exhibited in 1940 at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, along with photographs by Atget of Paris.

In 1940-1941 Laughlin did fashion photography for Vogue in New York. During World War II, he first worked for the Photography Department of the National Archives, then served in the United States Army Signal Corps Photographic Unit in Long Island City, New York, and with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, where he specialized in color photography.

Laughlin has earned his living since 1946 as a freelance photographer of contemporary architecture. His book of photographs of Southern plantation mansions, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, was published in 1948. It has since been reprinted 20 times.

Since 1948 Laughlin has lectured throughout the country on photographic aesthetics and American Victorian architecture, which he has documented extensively in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, San Francisco, and elsewhere. His photographs have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, American Heritage, Architectural Review, Life, Du, Aperture, Look, and Art News among other publications.

Since 1936 Laughlin has been the subject of over 200 one-man shows, including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Smithsoman Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum; and George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. A major retrospective of 229 photographs was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1973.

Laughlin was named an Associate of Research at the University of Louisville in 1968, and has been the subject of an Aperture monograph. Since 1974 he has concentrated on prose writing and the care of his enormous library of fantasy literature. A large portion of his body of over 17,000 sheet-film negatives was donated to the University of Louisville Archives in 1970.