Spirals and Double Vision — Visual Compositions’ Complexity Revealed

Enter and participate in the surreal world of Clarence Laughlin

LA Subway interior inverted Monochrome. Photo by Matthew Bamberg

Initially, twentieth-century master photographer Clarence Laughlin wanted to be a poet. While he was a bank teller, he wrote poems that he tried to sell. He went on to teach himself photography and build a darkroom.

Although Laughlin dropped out of high school, he was a voracious reader, which affected his writing, making it elaborate and haughty in his lengthy captions for his photos. As a Southern photographer, Laughlin was known for his photographs of plantations. He also photographed the New Orleans levee system as it was being built.

Laughlin grouped his photographs by categories, which can be loosely described as follows:

— Still lifes
— Marine and Tree forms
— Industrialim
— Metal, Glass
— New Orleans Fantasy
— Lost New Orleans
— Satires
— Lost People
— Visual Poetry
— Louisiana Plant…