Clarence John Laughlin and the Southern Surreal
The U.S. South is a region that has been dragged through the mud. The narrative that the larger nation has come to know of the South is one that is transfixed in the time of Reconstruction or the Jim Crow era, but not one that defines the South as a cultural haven for artists and thought alike.
While the nineteenth century had its fair share of Southern intellectuals and artists, the twentieth century saw a culture rise out of the history of a land that had been haunted by its past. After emancipation, the Confederate states had to redefine themselves as members of the nation at large.
Places like Mississippi and Louisiana, where astounding portions of the population were slaves, had to redefine themselves with the landscape of the civil war and slavery as their backyard. For states who had institutionalized slavery on the largest of scales, it is simply not enough to free the slaves and forget the past. New Orleans and the surrounding areas of Louisiana create a setting for Clarence John Laughlin to capture a moment in history that marked the past roots of the South while also foreshadowing a near future on the brink. By focusing on plantations of the Old South along with ruins of the city Laughlin vividly captures the destruction of the Old South within its own regional landscape. Laughlin also catured the newly divided city of New Orleans by focusing on the Black demographic in the French Quarter and on the outskirts of the city itself.
To define Laughlin’s work as distinctly Southern works twofold. First, Laughlin is from the South and almost all of his images are depictions of the South that he loves. Plantations make up the primary objects of most of his photography, but he also is noted for working with the countryside of Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the city of New Orleans as a backdrop for political statements. While Laughlin obviously chooses what he will shoot, he captures the South as it is. Laughlin’s images are a sliver in time of a decaying discourse of the Old South. By showing the destruction of the old plantation homes, which in the past represented the white elitist system, Laughlin is politically stating the change in attitude of the South as a whole. Laughlin, however, was not blind to the new forms of chaos in the South and we see in his photography of the Black population of the South, how he views their liminal place in society.
Second, Laughlin was never respected by his peers and constantly critiqued by the “in group” photographers of his time. Having been born in Lake Charles, Louisiana and moving to New Orleans when he was five, much like the South that he depicts, Laughlin was a second rate photographer because of his birthplace as well as the objects that he photographed. As a true Southern artist, Laughlin created a surrealist mode of photography in America, which had not been done prior.
Laughlin used written prose, which he called poetry, to state the transcendence that he saw of the objects that he photographed. As a result of his intricate detail in choice of words and expressions, the viewer of his photography becomes a reader not only of the captions of the photos but of visual poetry as well.
Studying the elements of surrealism coupled with the Southern landscape as Laughlin views it, the next fourteen weeks I will entertain a study of the Southern surreal as it pertains to Clarence John Laughlin’s photography as documents of the twentieth century South.
