Museum Exhibits Laughlin’s New Orleans Photos

Photographer viewed architecture as the ideal union of nature and culture.

Meaghan O'Neill -- Interior Design, 12/13/2005

While working as a photographer for the U.S. Engineer Corps from 1936 to 1941, Clarence John Laughlin documented the Mississippi River levee projects, mausoleums, antebellum mansions, and other distinctive structures that capture New Orleans’s architectural heritage. The American photographer, who died in 1985, eventually came to view architecture as the ideal union of nature and culture and, as such, one of humankind’s most significant feats.

Laughlin’s New Orleans photographs are the anchor of a new exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “The Secret Life of Buildings: Photographs by Clarence John Laughlin,” on view from December 17–April 30, 2006. The work in the show is drawn from the museum’s own collection of more than 250 photographs made by Laughlin between 1940 and the mid-1960’s.

“Laughlin used architecture as a point of departure for his own poetic explorations of human psychology,” says Katherine Ware, photography curator for the museum. His images of decaying buildings shrouded in shadows have a haunting quality, layered with history and memories--their “secret life,” as Laughlin described them. Poetical titles for the images seem to be inspired by his interest in the writings of French Symbolists such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.

Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the self-taught Laughlin is best-known for his elegiac volume Ghosts Along the Mississippi, published in 1948, which recorded dilapidated manor houses of the antebellum South. He also contributed to magazines such as Vogue and worked with the photography department at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.