Clarence John Laugh­lin orga­nizes a life’s work — an excerpt:

GROUP A: STILL LIFES
This group, the ear­li­est on which I worked, was begun in 1935. I started with no for­mal train­ing at all as a painter or pho­tog­ra­pher, but with some back­ground as a writer, and a vast back­ground as a reader. Although this group orig­i­nated in a desire to develop fur­ther an inter­est in com­po­si­tion (incited by the dis­cov­ery of cer­tain art mag­a­zines in the 1930s) it even­tu­ally became involved in an urge to see how far my feel­ings about objects could become pro­jected through the cam­era; and in the dis­cov­ery of objects which could become the clues to changes in the nature of Amer­i­can cul­ture. Thus, here, as in much of my work, there is a pro­gres­sion from the semi-abstract to the poetic.

GROUP J: THE IMAGES OF THE LOST
Group J deals with the peo­ple rejected by our soci­ety; it is the first group pri­mar­ily devoted to human beings. But the peo­ple were very sel­dom pho­tographed where they were actu­ally found. Instead, a dif­fi­cult method was used: a spe­cial back­ground was selected for each per­son (often from places dis­cov­ered pre­vi­ously) with the inten­tion of mak­ing the back­ground work, not only in terms of design, but in terms of a sub­tle rev­e­la­tion of the over­all social sit­u­a­tion of the per­son. The peo­ple them­selves were not used as mod­els — they were not posed — nor were they used as “soci­o­log­i­cal doc­u­ments.” The attempt was to treat them as indi­vid­ual human beings. The over­all com­po­si­tion was deter­mined care­fully on the ground glass. But the expo­sure was not made till each per­son seemed to reveal him­self by some spon­ta­neous ges­ture or expression.

GROUP Q: NEW ANATOMIES
In this com­par­a­tively small group, which began in 1951, I have tried to show that the cam­era can explore the plas­tic poten­tial­i­ties of the human body in just as real a sense as, for instance, Picasso has done in some mar­velous draw­ings where he makes use of numer­ous kinds of dis­tor­tion in recre­at­ing the body; although in these pho­tos dis­tor­tion is not the method actu­ally used. Nev­er­the­less we are pre­sented with visions of the body which it would be impos­si­ble for the phys­i­cal eye directly to see. The pic­tures go com­pletely beyond the kind of “record­ing” func­tion usu­ally assigned to the cam­era, and instead of giv­ing us the results of direct vision, give us far more — the hyper-real vision cre­ated by the inner eye in man — the poetic, desir­ing, and dream­ing eye. Because of this, the erotic ele­ment becomes all the more intense. But due to the puri­tan­i­cal code dom­i­nat­ing this coun­try till recently, none of these pic­tures have ever been pub­lished or exhib­ited before. The basic quo­ta­tion for this series is from Hart Crane: “New thresh­olds, new anatomies!” And the last half of this quo­ta­tion is, lit­er­ally, the sub­ject for this group.

GROUP S: THE MAGIC OF THE OBJECT
It should be pointed out that Group S is the only one of the many groups I worked on which is entirely devoted to so-called com­mon­place objects. In this group I try to show how the pho­tog­ra­pher, like the painter and poet, can release a level of mean­ing from the most ordi­nary objects, which has noth­ing to do with their nat­u­ral­is­tic mean­ing. The pho­tog­ra­pher, of course, does this through intensely per­sonal vision (just as is true of the painter and the poet) and when this hap­pens, what the pho­tog­ra­pher is really deal­ing with is what the human mind has pro­jected into the object: the secret lan­guage of inan­i­mate objects, the hid­den images of man’s hopes and joys, his dreams and desires, by which he makes more human the inhu­man world around him. Although most of these pic­tures use the “found” object, all the objects are, in a deeper sense, “well arranged,” that is, light­ing, com­po­si­tion, and other fac­tors have been used, both con­sciously and com­pul­sively, to make more man­i­fest the hid­den mean­ings these objects have for the sen­si­bil­ity of the pho­tog­ra­pher. But, aside from all this, many of the objects in these pic­tures can be truly, con­sid­ered part of the iconog­ra­phy of our time.

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