Photo by Clarence John Laughlin
"Elegy for Moss Land," The Clarence John Laughlin Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection, 1981.247.1.888
The poet-photographer Clarence John Laughlin, resident surrealist of twentieth-century New Orleans, was emphatically concerned with both the ennuyé of the Southern Gothic and the destiny of architecture once it succumbed to abandon, ruin, and neglect. In his lifetime, he understood such subjects as allegories for the South’s decline following the Civil War, but he also believed he could use Louisiana’s landscapes, which he lived among for the whole of his life, as vehicles for modernist expression. In relying on his familiar environment, he thus freed himself to experiment with his prints’ very constitution—finishing them with floor varnish as a lacquer, which he is said to have carried in water-filled buckets from his Metairie studio to the Pontalba via streetcar. The results were one-of-a-kind “painted” works.
Laughlin’s conditions for the exhibition and purchase of his images were exacting, and at times alienating, to those who would have otherwise expressed interest in them. It is hard not to assume that his difficult personality, along with his photographs’ overdependence on literary and historical motifs, are contributing factors to his work’s present marginalization, despite the high regard and professional success he achieved over the course of his career.
His contemporaries held his work in esteem, as evidenced by commissions from Minor White at Aperture and an invitation by Josef Albers to exhibit his photographs at Black Mountain College. Others regarded his mid-century commitment to his immediate locale as regional and thus provincial. But in the modern day, even while they have largely fallen out of the public eye, his works have maintained an enduring prescience, given what we now know of Louisiana’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change and the incremental loss of its traditional cultures and heritage as a result.
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Photo by Clarence John Laughlin.
Clarence John Laughlin. "Staircase to Emptiness, Number Three," he Clarence John Laughlin Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection,1983.47.4.2678.
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Photo by Clarence John Laughlin
Clarence John Laughlin. "The Tall Boy," The Clarence John Laughlin Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection, 1981.247.1.891.
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Photo by Clarence John Laughlin
"The Shadows Fall, Number One. The Black Professional," The Clarence John Laughlin Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection. 1981.247.1.1066.
I have long admired Laughlin’s pictures, and was delighted, although perhaps a bit saddened, to learn he considered himself first a writer, but pivoted his creative focus to photography when he realized it was the more lucrative pursuit. He never did completely abandon the former: his captions and notes, which were ignored or critically dismissed in his lifetime, are now archived at the Historic New Orleans Collection, accounting for the second half of what he referred to as his “image-text works,” where the one informs the other as integral part of an interdisciplinary whole. His writings affirm the scholarly rigor of his photographic work, most of which is not chiefly aesthetic (in spite of its great beauty) so much as it is narrative, research-driven, and intellectually considered. Both are deeply poetic, owing their providence to Laughlin’s idol, the symbolist Charles Baudelaire.
Plantations, cemeteries, and churches constitute the subject matter of his unpublished Louisiana Project, which was made up of photographs that are haunting, elegiac, contradictorily romantic and morose. But it is his note-taking, which is extensive and informs the belabored captions he scribed for each of these images, that accounts for the real meat of the project: In addition to the dates of construction for the edifices he photographed, the accountings of remodels, the names of their owners across history—he also writes of ghost buildings that preceded them. The notes include floridly detailed descriptions of each building’s workmanship and features, its architectural style, and the histories of such designs. Laughlin even endeavors to report the structures’ historical use and the misfortunes that resulted in their disrepair. His archive is thus more than a collection of artworks; it stands as an architectural log of the South that finds its contemporaries only in guidance issued by the United States Department of the Interior to the regional directors of the National Park Service regarding the evaluation of Deteriorated, Damaged, or Previously Altered Buildings.
Photo by Clarence John Laughlin
"Clarence John Laughlin photographing an interior," The Clarence John Laughlin Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection, 1981.247.12.15.
It is a compelling project, then, to consider how the ruins Laughlin photographed in the twentieth-century have fared to the present, given the environmental concerns that have characterized the first quarter of the twenty-first century and the evolving politics that inform the maintenance and preservation of historic sites. Many of the places he photographed have not survived, including the plantations Nottoway, which burned in 2025, and Uncle Sam, which succumbed to the Mississippi River as a result of levee work by the Army Corps of Engineers (the Mosaic Uncle Sam Chemical Plant in St. James Parish has since replaced it). The Girod Street Cemetery in New Orleans, the “earliest burial ground entirely devoted to Protestants,” which eventually became the “resting place for practically all important figures in the early history of the city who were non-Catholic,” was eventually demolished to make way the Union Terminal Station, from which the city’s buses and trains now depart. And the “Good Darky" statue in Natchitoches, erected in 1927 to memorialize Black workers’ “arduous and faithful service,” was removed from its original context in 1968; it now sits on an out-of-the-way plot of land behind the LSU Rural Life Museum in Baton Rouge.
More obscure destinations have fared ambiguously: There are no results in online searches for the status of Emanuel Negro Baptist Church near Barton, constructed by members of the congregation out of wood painted green “for luck.” This type of building (“the negro country churches” of Louisiana) Laughlin once described as having “undeniable value as Americana,” even if he could not recognize their “great importance historically or architecturally.” Today it is disheartening to imagine these histories lost to the past in the absence of a watchful eye.
One assumes the intention for Laughlin's Louisiana Project was twofold: both accounting for the status of human enterprises of personal intrigue at the time of its execution and a wish for their preservation into future time. As fate would have it, it is through Laughlin’s image-texts that these sculptures and buildings are salvaged for future generations’ consideration if not in life, encouraging magical thinking and narrative imagination—even when their history has been factually amended, and their grandeur diminished.
