The Archetype of Decadence - on a Photograph of Clarence John Laughlin

Take a moment to look at this photograph, by Clarence John Laughlin [1905-1985], entitled "Mother" Brown [1945]. 

At first glance, it appears to be a straightforward formal outdoor portrait of a late middle-aged African-American woman in a long dark dress or robe, with a large Xtian cross around her neck, standing in front of a formal architectural feature, a blind archway straddled by two decorative pediments. All of the information necessary to an understanding of the photographer's intention(s) is here, in black and white; we don't need to know the exact color of any part of the composition to understand the dialectic being offered.

The light is a few degrees from apex, perhaps it's 10:30 AM or 1:45 PM, it doesn't really matter. The shadow that is created by the archway and pediment is the real point of the light's angle. The shadow formed makes a large dark sickle which looms over the woman's head. The symbolism is perfectly obvious:  Death (the sickle) is poised over her. Will her cross protect her from the risk of mortality? 

Light and shadow (dark) are opposite poles in the dilemma of religious struggle. We don't have to know--as it happens--that "Mother" Brown was the leader of a religious cult in New Orleans which included Voodoo among its tenets. We don't need to know what kind of a building it is she's posed before. She stands in a dignified posture, secure in her beliefs, confident and convinced. Does the light reveal truths about her plight, or is this just the ironic accident of the angles and positions of the solar system and rays of the visible spectrum falling on pieces of shaped stone or stucco? 

The Gulf South--in particular New Orleans and the surrounding Delta Country--is subject to continuous melting decay, brought on by water and intense tropical heat. Bodies buried in the ground literally "float upwards" to the surface over time, hence burial practice dictates that bodies be placed in vaults instead of in the earth. In the context of Post-Bellum Southern decay and decadence, superstition is often associated with fetish-objects. In a critical statement by Laughlin, he says "the physical object, to me, is merely a stepping-stone to an inner world where the object, with the help of subconscious drives and focused perceptioins, becomes transmuted into a symbol whose life is beyond the life of the objcts we know and whose meaning is a truly human meaning." 

 

In this photograph, the cross--fixed symbol of Xtian dogma throughout history, worn by acolytes and followers as a talisman of their faith, or as a charm to ward off "evil"--is contrasted with a mythical symbol of mortality. But the contrast doesn't imply struggle. The diagonal lines of shadow throw the scene into vivid relief. Her body, surrounded by symbolic shadows, masquerades as subject, a hostage to art.

Is Laughlin telling us something else about life and death, belief and delusion?