Flowers of the Night Land
Photography

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Flowers of the Night Land
Artwork Details
Artist/Maker
Clarence John Laughlin
American, 1905–1985
American, 1905–1985
Date
1958, printed 1976
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Accession #
1981.86
Dimensions
10 1/4 × 13 1/8 inches
Location
Currently Not on View
Description
In Flowers of the Night Land, Laughlin tightly cropped a wreath of artificial flowers on a New Orleans tomb in negative. This technique encompasses the blooms in darkness and lends the image an ominous tone. Laughlin wrote of the transformative effects of his printing process: “Naturalistically, this print derives from a vertical transparency of a clump of artificial flowers hanging on the wall of a New Orleans tomb. But in the ‘transcendence’ which this print represents, every spatial relationship, as seen by the eye—as well as all the ‘normal’ meanings of the objects—has been completely altered.”