Flowers of the Night Land

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.”