Clarence John Laughlin

Clarence John Laughlin (1905 - 2 January 1985) was a United States photographer best known for his surrealist photographs of the U.S. South. Laughlin was born in to a middle class family in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His rocky childhood, southern heritage, and interest in literature influenced his work greatly. After losing everything in a failed rice-growing venture in 1910, his family was forced to relocate to New Orleans where Laughlin's father found work in a factory. Laughlin was an introverted child with few friends and a close relationship with his father, who cultivated and encouraged his lifelong love of literature and whose death in 1918 devastated his son.
Although he dropped out of high school in 1920, after having barely completed his freshman year, Laughlin was an educated and highly literate man. His large vocabulary and love of language are evident in the elaborate captions he later wrote to accompany his photographs. He initially aspired to be a writer and wrote many poems and stories in the style of French symbolism, most of which remained unpublished.
(Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_John_Laughlin

The Mirror of Nothingness, 1957  by Clarence John Laughlin

 "Your pictures are not waiting to be looked at - they are looking"

"I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer....this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts."

"..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...."



Musica : Les Joyaux De La Princesse & Regard Extrême, Weiße Blätter.

Clarence John Laughlin, 1941