Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical.

Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.

- Clarence John Laughlin

 

In our society, most of us wear protective masks of various kinds and for various reasons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters.

- Clarence John Laughlin - in 1973.

 

It should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet of painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself. - Clarence John Laughlin