Time Traveling

On Louisiana Photographers Clarence John Laughlin

& Dody Weston Thompson

With a two-century gap separating us from the invention of the camera, it’s hard to process the awe that it inspired in its first witnesses.  At this distance, it gets easier to view photos as ordinary. But with the beginning of photography, for the first time ever,  you could make a record of a single moment instantly—and as the 20th century picked up speed, American artists were still not yet inured to the magic of that fact.

For the New Orleans photographer Clarence John Laughlin, capturing an individual moment wasn't enough. From 1930 through the 1980’s, he became obsessed with the idea of using photography to show time as a continuum within a single image. Laughlin viewed the past as not only determining the present, but as continuing to exist—only somewhere inaccessible. In Louisiana, he found that feeling almost overwhelming. 

Laughlin spent most of his life in the Upper Pontalba building on Jackson Square. What kept him in the city, and drew him to the river and the swamps surrounding it, was this fixation with time. In the “grimy streets,” “little used and secluded cemeteries,” and “decaying and isolated houses,” he felt the past layered just underneath the surface of the current moment. He saw old architecture as a “living extension of the past'', with the shapes of the buildings determined by the minds of the dead. For him, the words “spirit” or “ghost” were approximate but inadequate language to describe the power that the dead have over us, something that they imposed through the customs and conventions they founded, heredity, and the ripple effects of long-ago actions. 

In his photography, Laughlin searched for ways to communicate these ideas, ways he could show other people how the world looked to him. He’d get up at dawn and take walks though the Quarter and the Garden District with his camera, then take three buses across town, weighed down with folders and heavy equipment, to get to his darkroom. He’d work frantically, spending sixteen-hour stretches in a hot cramped room without air-conditioning, breaking only for sandwiches. Using multiple exposures, composite negatives, collage, and other techniques, he’d try to make layers of time visible. Then he’d bus home late at night and repeat the process the next day. Sometimes he found subjects that spoke to him while walking through neighborhoods near his apartment, sometimes he went out to the swamps, and sometimes he staged his own elaborate scenes. Anyone walking past an Uptown cemetery in the late 1930’s might have seen Laughlin at work, with a teenager dragging camera equipment and props between the gravesites and posing for his pictures. 

1981.247.1.799 / The Masks Grow to Us, Clarence John Laughlin. All images courtesy The Clarence John Laughlin Archive at The Historic New Orleans Collection.

The  teenager was Dody Weston Thompson, then Dody Harrison, his favorite model. She agreed to help Laughlin as a favor for her mother, who moved within a circle of French Quarter artist and writer friends that the photographer counted himself among. One of the most well-known pictures from their time working together shows Dody wearing a veil and pearls, standing in front of a brick wall lined with vines, her face partially obscured by half of a porcelain mask. In others, Laughlin has used a double-exposure to overlay her face with palm leaves, or with flowers.  These images did little to capture her imagination—but the early exposure to photography left an impression on her that would resurface later. Dody grew up in New Orleans, like Laughlin. But the city didn’t have the same hold over her; she would leave home before turning eighteen. 

Both artists were active at a time when photography was still establishing itself as an art form. While making their work, they were steeped in an atmosphere of  heady debate—the photographic community was squabbling internally over what the basic artistic principles of this new medium should be, and fighting with the wider art world to prove that an image made with a machine could be considered art. Some of the first photographs that both Dody and Clarence saw were shots of the French Quarter printed to sell to tourists. They were made in the Pictorialist style which was predominant while Clarence was young, and still in use but dated by the time Dody saw them. Neither artist was impressed by them. Their styles developed in opposition to that approach, and in separate directions from each other’s work. 

Pictorialist photos were soft-focus, impressionistic, romantic images that were meant to demonstrate the potential of photography as an art form by making photographs that imitated paintings. By the time Clarence first picked up a camera, the movement was falling out of fashion and being replaced by the West Coast Photographic Movement, or Straight photography. These photographers abandoned the impulse to emulate paintings and emphasized the qualities that make photography distinct from other artistic mediums. They stressed sharp focus, rich tonality, and geometric structure. They wanted to document reality as directly as possible. The movement would become the foundation of Modern photography. Dody’s next mentor was at the forefront of it. 

As an adult, Dody moved to California, and was as transfixed by the American West as her first mentor had been by the South. California at this time, and especially the Bay Area, was a mecca for photographers, pulsating with innovation and talent. They were drawn to the dramatic landscapes and ever-expanding artistic community, and absorbed by the intoxicating feeling that something big was happening. Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and their collaborators and contemporaries were working at the height of their powers, making landscape photographs that were literally breathtaking, and at the same time redefining what the art world believed photography could and should be. Life was a whirlwind of creative energy and exchange, at once deeply exciting and deeply fulfilling. Cocktail parties lasted till morning, and might be immediately followed by a trek to the beach, the mountains, the forest, the desert. Dody fell in love head first.  

In 1946, now twenty-three, she saw a retrospective of Edward Weston's work in San Francisco. A year later, she drove out to the beach near his home, found a public phone, held her breath, and dialed his number.

Weston was one of the biggest names in photography, known for his landscapes, innovative nudes, and close-up still lifes of seashells and other found objects. An hour after Dody called him, she was in his studio in Carmel. He let her look through his prints, and asked if she wanted to be his assistant in exchange for photography lessons. 

This was not her first time in a photographer’s studio, or the first time she had the  opportunity to examine a photographer’s body of work up-close. For whatever reason, her previous experiences had inspired no particular interest in or love for the craft. What was it about seeing Weston's work that made her determined to become a photographer? Years later, she described the experience of first looking at the pictures, “I had never seen anything like these photographs. A wonderful quality of light emanated from them. Some glowed like pearls, some glittered diamond-sharp. Aside from their subject matter, they could be enjoyed solely for this.” She revered the deep tonal range of the photos, their precise rendering of physical surfaces and landscapes. For Clarence, the need to photograph was tied to his relationship with time, for Dody, it was an affinity with space. 

As she came into her own, she produced an extensive collection that reveals her reverence for her adopted home. The intense range of shades possible within black and white photography continued to affect her the same way that they had the first time she experienced them. In her journal she wrote, “I had never realized that this virtually infinite variety of intermediate shades between black and white constituted a unique phenomenon...not to be found in any other medium in the entire history of art...this scale of grays which the skilled photographer can expand or contract like an accordion of unknown length pretty much at will.” Throughout her career, she remained dedicated to perfecting the concepts of the Straight photography movement. Her technical mastery, her ability to quickly, intuitively, and precisely expose an image, was exceptional. She took on a multitude of subjects, but landscape never loosened its grip on her. 

1983.47.4.666 / The Self-Crucified, Clarence John Laughlin

The bodies of work that Dody Weston Thompson and Clarence John Laughlin left behind demonstrate markedly separate ways of addressing the questions that loomed large in the time they were working—“is photography art?” and, “if it is art, what should it look like?” Clarence was less interested in presenting a physical form as it immediately appears than he was in using photography to infuse or reveal meanings in that form. He didn't have any documentarian aversion to staged shots or manipulated photos—his alterations served a vision he wouldn’t otherwise be able to share. Dody favored unmanipulated photos and preferred to come across a scene rather than staging a shot. She was less moved by Laughlin’s fantastical illuminations of his subjects than she was by unaltered images of land as it is. She wanted her photographs to be the most faithful records of the external world that she could make. 

Laughlin admired the West Coast photographers, but he saw his own work as moving beyond theirs. The documentary quality that was so central to the aims of their movement seemed limiting to him. He described the approach that he developed, which he called “The Third World of Photography,” in a text he wrote for a 1982 exhibition of his own and Edward Weston’s art for the New Orleans Museum of Art. While Straight photographers were mainly concerned with “treating the object only in terms of design, texture, and tone,” he felt that “the object, additionally, could be treated in terms of inner perceptions and compulsions, in terms of intuition and symbolism.” He aimed to transfer into the resulting image the photographer’s human connection to, and perception of, a scene, and the potentially infinite web of associations tied to any given object. Elsewhere he wrote, “I am not primarily interested in the camera as a recording mechanism, but rather, in its possibilities as an extension of the inner eye.”

Clarence lived in New Orleans all his life, but he hated the heat and wrote often in letters to his friends that he wanted to move to California. Because  he felt most attuned to the nature of time as he understood it while in his own city, and was dedicated to capturing it, he was bound and unable to leave. But he felt creatively isolated in Louisiana. Dody liked to describe herself as an “escaped Southerner.”  The circles that she moved in on the West Coast–her involvement with Group f/64, and the then-infant Aperture magazine–represented to Clarence a degree of recognition, and a sense of community, that he longed for. 

At the same time, he was reluctant to tie himself to any art movement. And the work he was making was so far afield of the conventions of theirs or any other major movement, so unlike anything else that was being made in the U.S. at the time, that it would have been hard for him to find a like-minded group to associate himself with had he sought one. He felt that he was overlooked by his contemporaries because of this, saw himself as an outsider, and was bitter about it while at the same time cultivating that image. The general lack of understanding of his work among his peers, and his own cranky disposition, worked to exacerbate each other–and his desire for inclusion in the artistic conversation went mostly unmet. He had brief brushes with the West Coast community, and made bids for connection–with varying success at best. 

In the  summer of 1941, five years before he began working with Dody, Edward Weston stopped to meet Clarence John Laughlin while passing through Louisiana. For a few days they drove around in a borrowed car, visiting swamps and plantation houses including Belle Grove, Meraux, and Woodlawn, and taking pictures. Some of the photos that he and Laughlin took on that trip could be seen in the aforementioned 1982 NOMA exhibit, and work to illustrate the difference between the two men’s styles, with side-by-side comparisons of images made on the same day, location, and often of the same subject. If you’d have gone to that show, you’d have seen doubles of the same moss-draped trees, ruined houses, tombstones, toys, and disintegrating pieces of bedroom furniture. Weston's images are straight-on, evenly framed, attentively focused. Laughlin’s might have the horizon off-kilter, and maybe with an object made unidentifiable by motion-blur shooting through the frame, or else the image might look as though seen through a tunnel or reflected in a mirror. One photo is overlaid with transparent multiples of the same scene taken from slightly different angles, as it would be viewed if you were standing in several different places at once. There are veiled figures and human shadows in Laughlin’s shots that are not present in Weston’s. The titles of the works also demonstrate something about their separate approaches. Weston’s photo of a plaster figurine is called “Meraux Plantation House, Louisiana.” Laughlin’s photo of the same doll is given a more poetic, or fussy, title: “Mystery of Chance.” 

Ten years later after Weston’s trip to Louisiana, Laughlin traveled to California. He saw Weston again at a cocktail party, and the same night met other major players in the movement including Ansel Adams, Imogene Cunningham, and Minor White. These photographers had little respect for Laughlin, viewing the mystical elements that he pulled into his work as nonsense. Minor White, who edited Aperture, was the exception—he had an affinity for mysticism, and liked Clarence’s pictures. During this visit, Clarence was within a few miles of Dody’s house, but they didn’t reconnect. 

These two cross-country trips are crossroads; moments where the history of American photography might have easily taken an alternate direction. What would photography look like now if Laughlin’s images had gained more traction, if his ideas had taken hold? In another timeline–one where the belief that Straight photography and good photography were one and the same had been a little less rigidly held–his contemporaries and successors could have taken his concepts in more directions. If it had become more common to compose an image with as much thought to time as to space, what other art would have gotten made?

As it was, another ten years after his visit to California, Clarence saw a small surge in recognition for the first time. 1961 saw the reprint of his photobook Ghosts Along The Mississippi, and the publication of an Aperture article which praised his peculiar style and classed him alongside other respected experimental photographers: “The Eyes of Three Phantasts: Laughlin, Sommer, Bullock”. For most of his career he went unnoticed, but he is now seen as the first American Surrealist photographer, and is at least locally remembered. 

In an article Weston Thompson wrote for Aperture during the first year of the magazine’s run, she discusses photography’s position within the art world, and offers a perspective on the divisions within the community:

“The pendulum of thought has swung several times between "in-focus” and "out-of-focus” concepts during photography’s brief history. Surely a broader view of the medium can encompass both. I am seeking unity, not uniformity — the sort of underlying unity of principle whereby a painter may admire, say, the works of both Botticelli and Picasso. Having accepted that we are one of the graphic arts . . . we can come out of our specialized, defensive corner.  I have no wish to dictate in what manner a photograph should be made; but only to suggest from what directions we might profitably approach the medium as a whole.”

If we side with Dody’s argument against taking sides, the divide between Laughlin’s “Third World of Photography” and the West Coast Photographic Movement isn't about one approach being better or worse, or pitting surrealism and realism against each other. The question is what the creative conversation might have looked like if the mid-twentieth-century art world elites had paid more attention to the work that Laughlin was making. Even while preferring and pursuing something separate, they might have seen, absorbed, and responded to his photos, and the results could have been worthwhile. 

1981.247.1.888 / Elegy for Moss Land, Clarence John Laughlin

Whether what Laughlin was making was ethereal or campy, whether it was good or bad art, it was singular, and made with unusual ardor. Most of the days and hours that this man spent alive and awake, he gave to trying to make the unseen visible. An omniscient onlooker unimpressed by his pictures could still be impressed by his dedication to making them. Witnessing that devotion, they might be convinced to take another look at what he wanted to show them. The work was made with such different intentions in mind that it’s unproductive to evaluate it against the standards of Straight photography, but it was often considered only on those terms.

To the influential circle of friends and collaborators that Dody found when she left home and went West, her former mentor’s haunted photographs were hokey. The West Coast artists were devoted to realism, and at best humored him. To them, Laughlin’s attempts to visualize time layered over itself and “unveil” emotional and spiritual connections to objects looked an awful lot like making things up. They couldn’t see what he saw, so they thought it wasn’t there.  

The Western Canon has sided with the Californians. These artists are better celebrated and remembered; Laughlin is a footnote in art history in comparison. An opportunity to build off of his contributions appeared at the time, and was passed up. But that doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. For anyone who connects with the images now, looking back at Laughlin can inspire new potential creative trajectories. The canon is fluid, changeable, living. We are capable of resurrecting the dead. 

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Suggestions for further reading: 

Newhall, Nancy Lynne, and Beaumont Newhall. From Adams to Stieglitz: Pioneers of Modern Photography. Aperture, 1999. 

Laughlin, Clarence John, and John E. Bullard. Edward Weston and Clarence John Laughlin: An Introduction to the Third World of Photography. NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART, 1982. 

Meek, A.J. Clarence John Laughlin: Prophet without Honor. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 

Laughlin, Clarence John. Ghosts along the Mississippi. BONANZA BOOKS, 1961. Weston Thompson, Dody. “Photography as Art .” Aperture, Winter 1952, pp. 24–30.

Cover Image: 1981.247.1.888 / Elegy for Moss Land, Clarence John Laughlin