Louisiana Legends; Clarence John Laughlin

Funding for the production of Legends is provided in part by the Friends of LPB. [no audio] We don't really know what the nature of reality is. We only think we know.

It's a mystery. I know that, and I'm not going to solve it. Those are the words of Clarence John Laughlin, one of the great photographers in the world, a man whose photographs have been shown in most of the very renowned museums all over the face of this Earth. He was born in 1905 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. And at that point, welcome to Louisiana Legends, John. I'm very glad to be here. John, you went from Lake Charles as a very small child to New Iberia, Louisiana. I went from Lake Charles back home because my mother and father were just on a visit to Lake Charles. I see. We went back home to the plantation outside of New Iberia where we lived. I was five years old or slightly beyond that we came to New Orleans. One of your dear friends is Weeks Hall.

What are some impressions of Weeks Hall, who is a legend? Oh, he was a legend almost in his own time. Yes. He was in the first World War. His family (inaudible) ....a house for quite a long time. It was not really a plantation house. It was a townhouse but most people assume it was a plantation. And they had, had very beautiful grounds around it. But during the time when Weeks was in the army in World War I, it ran into trouble and the family ran into trouble. Economic trouble. And Weeks stayed behind in Paris after the war and studied painting and became an extremely good painter. And eventually went back home to find that the house was almost in ruins. He then dedicated himself to restoring this house, this beautiful house, and the gardens around it. Yes. Exactly.

And behind the house and his gardens ran Bayou Teche, which winds all through that country. John, you moved to New Orleans then at the age of five. Is that correct? Yes. Spent your childhood there and then at some point, I read in some of the research on you, you considered becoming a priest. Well, my mother wanted me to, but by that time I was getting to be... I had already gone to a Roman Catholic grammar school called St. Henry's, which was a short distance away. And also I had discovered that there was a library not far away, about two and a half blocks away. And in those days the Creole families still allowed the children to go out by themselves. So when I first went to the library. I don't know really why I went. For some reason I wanted to go to that library. And I don't know exactly why. I still haven't been able to figure out, but my father took me. I can even remember the first book I read in that library, The Arabian Nights. And in time I must have read every fairy tale in the

library and I think that is really the thing that triggered off the growth of my imagination. Would you have been a good priest? You are a mystic. Perhaps. You know, I'm really... there were people who did, were produced by the French, the Catholic church. Saint Francis of Assisi was one of those (inaudible) because he had a really genuine love for nature which our society, in many cases, doesn't. But. You worked in a bank. Oh, yes. So did T.S. Eliot. I worked in the old, the old Marine Bank, which has gone under long since. I worked in the Marine Bank. I worked in the............Did you work there and dream? Yes. I was reading. In those days I was reading four and five or six books a week. And I have a description of those days in the new book I've done which is not yet published.

It's called "Disappearing New Orleans: an essay and the poetry of remembrance." It's a beautiful title. It's like your pictures. It's beautiful. And I think it's because I was able in, say, the book I've done on Louisiana plantations. For that reason I think been quite successful. I was able to take architectural and historical data and combine them and display them in terms of a special kind of imagination. And this is what has made the book, the plantation book, a success. It's now in it's 18th reprinting. It's 18th. Let's see, the title of that is. "Ghosts Along the Mississippi." "Ghosts Along the Mississippi." John, what is your first memory of a camera? When when did this? Somebody gave me. Yeah somebody gave me a box camera. And after I had a birthday present. And I had it for a month, I decided I was going to take it

seriously and, but I had, of course, no knowledge, and I didn't have a darkroom. I can remember that I finally made a kind of a dark room in an old shed behind the house we were living in on General Pershing Street. When we first moved into it the name of the street was changed during World War I into General Pershing. Anyway. In Berlin? Into Pershing? It was a patriotic change, to say the least. It certainly was. And I started a darkroom in an old shed behind the house with a tar paper roof and, of course, it was so hot in there you couldn't work there in the summertime, only in the winter. And I made my own enlarger from an article in Popular Science magazine, a wooden box with a little headlight tinfoil and the camera was strapped to the box to give, to project the image. John, Louisiana has been described, the Louisiana that your pictures reflect and capture,

It's been described as, as private and mysterious. Are those valid observations about your work? I think that any man who is a good writer, a good painter, a good poet, eventually finds his own private version because his mind is not working exactly like the average person and therefore in a sense must be private. But if he has sufficient talent, this private vision can be conveyed to other people. What is mysterious about the state in which we dwell? Where do you find mystery in it? Well, first of all in these strange houses, the decay, the houses which are falling to pieces. I started photographing the plantations and I started photography in 1935 and I had already begun to photograph the plantations. And there were many of the houses then were in ruins and some of them were falling apart, and they were never restored. Like Lemon

Plantation. Like Uncle Sam plantation, which went into the river. It was the most complete plantation group in Louisiana at the time, but the levee had to be set back so the house went into the river. Those houses -- to the layman, to the neophyte -- those houses are themselves dreams. Yes. What did it do to those people to dwell in those dream worlds? Well, first of all, you know, the Louisiana plantation culture of the 19th century was the last non-urban culture of the United States, the last culture which was not based upon cities. The plantations were complete in themselves. And Parlange Plantation, and a number of the others, the furniture in the houses were brought directly from Paris across the ocean and up the river to the walls of the plantation, and some of the big plantations raised a lot of things besides sugarcane or cotton. In fact the plantation which was which was owned by....he's one of the

the great plantation owners of the West Bank. He prided himself that any guests that came to the house, he could set them down to a dinner with soup to cigars and all of it that one way or the other was grown on that plantation. So let me ask you: These people would dwell in the rarefied atmosphere of those plantations and obviously, in many cases, were able to shut out the horror of slavery right from their window. They had to live in a dream world. Yeah, they had to live in a dream world. And yet, on the other hand you see, Louisiana was the only state in the South which during the 19th century was able to evolve its own architecture. All the houses you see in Alabama, Georgia... there was a certain type of plantation house in Louisiana which is, which is exemplified, for instance, by Oak Alley, a huge square

house where you had very deep galleries, your columns reiterated the majesty of the great trees that led up to the house. The galleries were so deep that the sunlight never got into the rooms except in the early morning and the late afternoons. You had enormous hip roofs which could shed the heavy rainfall. These houses were represented and every room opened on the central hall and onto the galleries. So you had cross-ventilation everywhere. That kind of house did not exist in the other southern states. It was evolved mostly by the French and Creole families, not the English families. You yourself ended up being perhaps in one of the more unusual dwelling places of anyone I know: the attic of the upper Pontalba building in New Orleans. An apartment house. They used to ....How did you end up over there, John? I really don't know exactly. I got out of the Army in 1946

and I knew I was going to, because I had already had a lot of books in storage in a warehouse, and I was going to have to get those books out of storage. I was going, I didn't have very much money and they weren't paying U.S. soldiers very large salaries then, I can tell you. And I would have to get something that had a lot of space and was not too expensive. So I got finally, after getting on a list, I got an attic on the upper Pontalba building on the street side which cost me, I think, $48 hours a month when I moved in. Now I think there's around $200 or $300 a month. And how long did you live there? I lived there for almost 32 years. With some 30,000 books. Yes. I kept on accumulating books. And your photography equipment? Oh, yes, thousands and thousands of pictures. Now something interests me very much. Your library contains, contains, among other things, comic books, first editions and books on psychic phenomena.

What an interesting conglomeration! Well, the comic books are mostly for purposes of investment. Frankly it's the only thing I've ever bought for investment and I've got a big collection of pulp magazines, too. Because mostly the ones that I have deal with science fiction. But some of those 10, 15, 25 cents pulp magazines are worth $35, $50, $75, $100 apiece. With the comic books, certain ones are worth even more. Amazingly enough. Now how about the psychic phenomena? Is there anything to that? Is that humbug? Psychic phenomena. You know. Extrasensory perception. These things all have interested you. They do, very much. Because you see, in the cycle of evolution you might say, I went from religion to science. And now I'm in the process... I've become very disturbed by the realization that the scientists can misconstrue,

misconstrue thing, too, that their explanations do not always hold water. And I believe that there's something much more much to reality that we don't grasp right now. And that doesn't necessarily mean that these things are supernatural. It may simply mean that just like we don't really understand - we can control electricity, we can deduct what the atoms are composed of, what the parts are. But now, as time goes on, we discover smaller and smaller parts. We also discover larger and larger entities in space. So where does it end? You've described yourself as an extreme romantic. Now my question is this: Can a romantic survive in our very harsh, let-it-all-hang-out

out time? I probably could not survive if I had to make my living now. Fortunately, I don't. I have done such a tremendous amount of work and some of the work is so important because I've got architectural material that I don't really know that anyone else has. I have, for instance, over 2,000 negatives of the Victorian architecture in Chicago. And all this people are now becoming interested in, so I've been able to sell my collection, at least one copy of every print to the Historic New Orleans Collection. And finally I'm getting... because I made these things because I love the houses. I got interested. I got interested in how the Victorians were involved with a kind of functionalism that goes beyond our functionalism. So if I had to start working now in the field -- and I worked for many years as a architectural photographer -- had to photograph new

architecture to make a living. Meanwhile I would always take a day off, two days each week, to photograph the things I wanted. How does a romantic, a sensitive creature? That's how I would do it. But how does a romantic, a sensitive creature. How does he handle hurt? In other words, of all the creatures put on God's Earth, a sensitive man must be the most easily injured. For example, when you first started, I'm sure that people did not think your work was important, did they? Oh, no. You, I'm sure, you were turned down many times. As a matter of fact, I had a photographer friends who often told me: Why don't you be more practical? You can make a lot more money. You're only living as a poor man because you want to. I said yes, because it gives me a chance to do some things for myself and, if I didn't do these things for myself, I would feel right. I managed to make a living of a kind and that satisfied me. Did you ever lose confidence in your talent or abilities at any point along the way? No.

I knew I had, almost from the very beginning, I knew that I had by the way I had developed and the way of the books I had read and the things I started to understand, I knew that my imagination was working. And I knew that as long as my imagination could work that I could produce some significant work. It seems to me, that of all the good, of all the creative endeavors, that photography wherein a person has to spend hours in a dark room alone. How does that affect a man? I can remember. You see, I didn't even have my own darkroom because the darkroom and eventually I moved to that house on General Pershing Street and moved into the upper Pontalba Building and there it was impossible to have a darkroom because the huge trucks passing downstairs were shaking the whole building. So I could not get sharp prints. So through a chance meeting with the Edgar Sterns, I was able to eventually use a

darkroom they had way out in Metairie. I had to go out there on three buses because I've never... been one of the few people I know who've never owned a car and when I used to pass City Park and knew I had to go into this darkroom where a New York architect designed the house and he didn't know much so he painted all the walls black, dead black and the concrete floor. And I went out there for at least 25 years. A kind of tomb, isn't it? I felt I should get off this bus and go and sit in the tree and I was terribly tempted every time I passed there. But I never did it because I knew if I didn't produce the work, I would never be able to get the kind of recognition I felt that this work deserved. The work, not just myself. Does it make you feel very good, after all of these years, to know that unlike most of us something which has come out of you and which you have produced will endure? Well, let's hope so. Let's hope so.

None of us can tell really what will happen, not even people is as great and he's probably the greatest painter of our time, Picasso, because if some of the things that have been, now are being materialized by the technology of our time, the deadly things and they destroy our whole civilization and everything is going to go. It's been said that you capture with your camera the mystery objects of everyday life. I've done a series called, I call the magic of the object, in which I use nothing but completely ordinary things. I have a book here, a book that's been published of my work. I'll show you afterwards. I was just in an old house in Houston. Yeah I've gone there to photograph architects. But it was a broken... the house was deserted, was empty. It was falling apart. It was just an ordinary house. But it had a window with a broken screen in it and the screen had been broken into two

parts. And I looked at these two parts. I got for some reason attracted to this thing and I realized that if this thing was seen right side up, you would see two strange creatures formed by this torn screen and they seemed to be talking to one another. So that these ordinary, commonplace pieces of torn screen became a symbol of communication which is when the basic human problems (fades) So I call it strange dialogue. So interesting. For you there are no inanimate objects. No. You see life in everything. Everything is alive. Everything. Even ordinary things have a kind of life. They are saying something. They're not saying it in words, but the human imagination can translate it into a human language, you see. That's the thing. Now, you haven't been able to, because of health, you have arthritis. You haven't been able to take pictures, to do photography for some seven or eight years.

I haven't given up hope completely. I'd like to go back to Paris and do some work. Paris is amazing. Do you miss the physical act though, the pleasure, the sensual pleasure? The strange thing to realize that they are strange and that they are saying something and that they can be made human. This is, this is the sense of adventure and discovery which really makes, makes a wonderful difference. If you're just doing something that you got to do for money, because somebody wants you to do it, it's not at all the same thing. It can't be the same thing. Do you find people...You find inanimate objects of mystery and of romance and with your genius you're able to capture that. Do you find the faces of people interesting? On, yeah. Also? Yeah. I've done. I've done a whole series of poetic interpretations of people which I call the visual poems. Most of them are girls. But they're always used against a special background. I never photographed heads sticking out of empty space because to me that doesn't express enough.

I want the human head with a special background to form a tie between them, to show that in way, in some poetic sense they're related to what I call true portraits. You have two sons, neither of whom is engaged in photography. Most unfortunately. Does that distress you not to have been able to pass that talent, that genius? No. I think, for instance, of the sons of Evan Weston. How much work they have, you know, how much printing they have done with his negatives since he's gone. And there's a number of other photographers I know whose children carry on. But you know, in the old days, jobs were often used to descend from the father to the son and grandson, but now this is almost nonexistent. Have you had any students who will know your technique? They can't know your... I never had. The people who write to me and say they would like to study under me. I don't have the facilities. Most of my... I've got my own darkroom now

for the first time in my life. It's three years since I moved into Gentilly. But so much space is taken up with the books and the magazines and the... I got big collection of phonograph records and so on that I really don't have the facilities to teach anybody. They would have to stay there, you see. What is the greatest thrill in your career? What gave you the most feeling of satisfaction? Or maybe there wasn't one. Maybe it's been... Well, some of that has come through photography and some of it has come through writing. You see, the publishers now think that "Ghosts Along the Mississippi," which is now has sold over 100,000 copies, is selling because of the way it's written. It's not a straight architectural book at all. If they had their way, it would have been. But at that time, Maxwell Perkins was working for Scribner's. Yes. And he was the person. He was a best editor there. He

saw what I was driving at. After he died and he died in the midst of the book going through the channels but I had a lot of friends saying that he wanted to tell me that he supported the way that I did that book so I stopped the Scribner's from changing the book into straight architecture. Yes. He was Thomas Wolfe's editor. Right, right and he did a great deal for Thomas Wolfe. Did you know Faulkner? You never met him? William Faulkner? No I wish I had met Thomas Wolfe because I like to believe that I'm in the same tradition because Wolfe is in the romantic tradition which started with Melville, which went to Edgar Allen Poe and James Branch ???? and then Thomas Wolfe. I like to think I'm in that tradition. Who do you enjoy today? Do you. Any writers that you enjoy reading today? I read a great deal of fantasy. Now there's a

tremendous upsurge of fantasy in world literature, not just in the United States. In England, France, Germany. You like Ray Bradbury? Oh yeah, sure. I've got some first editions of Ray Bradbury, and I knew him. I met him in Los Angeles. and I met, there was a young man who lived in Louisiana and died quite young. His name was Patrick O'Donnell. I have a terrible memory for names. He wrote The Great Big Doorstep about the people down the river. Yes. The Pilot Town. He came back from the tropics with he had that much hot food and he died very early, young. I was a good friend of his. Let me ask you this: At what point. This fascinates me. At what point

am I a photographer? I can really do this thing. I can create. I can't just capture, but I can create. Was it a picture? Was it a moment? No. What I've said to myself - I am a photographer because I am a writer. Because all those, all my inspiration, comes out of my writing or the writing with other people. The poetic cast of my mind comes out of ance with all the great American, English and French poets translated into my own idiom, you might say, but all the real inspiration comes from literature. John, you're a delightful man and a great artist and, of course, I'm honored to have this opportunity to chat with you. I was certainly very happy to have met you because you asked some of the right questions. Well it's the first thing I've done right this month, so you're going to make me feel good.

John, thank you so much. Thank you. I hope that we do meet again and if you ever should, by some chance, get to New Orleans I'll be very happy to show you my library. John Laughlin, great man, great photographer, a Louisiana legend. Thank you. Funding for the production of Legends is provided in part by the Friends of

LPB.