Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape

8: Voodoo

 Voodoo In New Orleans circa   blossomed a literary fascination with race, sexuality, fantasy, photography, and lost landscapes. ^[] BELLE GROVE BURNED ON MARCH , . THE GREAT plantation house blazed into the following morning. “This is the first picture I made on that Sunday, when the bricks were still hot,” wrote Clarence John Laughlin of one image. “Great cavities had opened in the walls, and against them moss can be seen dripping against the distant sky—like a suppuration of doom—the whole scene having much of the emotional quality of Piranesi’s engravings of Roman ruins—and indeed this house was very much like a palace of antiquity—completely lost in time and space.”¹ For decades Laughlin had been probing the antiquity of Louisiana, especially among the deserted plantations along the Mississippi and in the oldest neighborhoods of New Orleans. Especially out in the bayou country, along old ways tourists rarely discovered, he found obscurities that taxed his photographic skill. With David L. Cohn he published New Orleans and Its Living Past in , but the limited-edition volume only slightly advanced his reputation . The book emphasizes the peculiarities of a somnolent city dreaming and intermittently beset by nightmare. Seven years later the editors of Look published one of his Mardi Gras photographs in Look at America: The Country You Know, and Don’t Know, along with three other Laughlin images: one of a cemetery, another of a walled Creole courtyard seen from above, and one of the filigree of a French Quarter wrought-iron balcony.² The Look editors lauded Laughlin’s technical brilliance and valued his idiosyncratic aesthetic. Only a few critics had hitherto noticed his work, and they dismissed it as quirky. In  Laughlin produced a folio of one hundred photographs, Ghosts along the Mississippi: An Essay in the Poetic Interpretation of Louisiana’s Plantation Architecture, that momentarily captured national attention. Twelve years later, Life featured many of his photographs in a sequence entitled “The Era of Sentiment and Splendour”: “Receding into the distance, shaded rows of old slave cabins line a long alley on Evergreen Plantation near Edgard, La.,” he wrote in the last caption of the Life sequence. “Now empty and gently dilapidated, the cabins with their square-framed porches create a haunting perspective of a long-vanished past.”³ By this time obscurity had well-nigh reclaimed Laughlin. Stung by lack of national notice, he had retreated into a private realm that rarely admitted publication. Despite occasional shows, particularly one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in , critics continued to ignore his work.⁴ Laughlin’s images of Belle Grove appeared both in Life and in his Ghosts along the Mississippi. The book emphasizes what Laughlin found ^]_ old fields peculiarly expressed in the Belle Grove house, “the dramatic contrast between the grandeur and decay of the great plantation houses.” Most of the houses he photographed had been abandoned for decades, or else occupied by caretakers unable to maintain them. The Belle Grove house epitomized the immense wealth made by some sugarcane planters: in  almost all the nation’s millionaires were planters living along the Mississippi. The seven thousand acres on which it sat made John Andrews , its creator, one of the wealthiest men in the United States in the s, and the house was one of the most extravagant in the nation when it stood complete in . The Civil War destroyed the Andrews fortune, and the house passed into other hands, then into abandonment in  when imported sugar wrecked domestic sugarcane growing. Laughlin photographed the seventy-five-room mansion over years, documenting the insidious destruction of water and plants, then the collapse of entire sections of façade. It became for him “a doomed and lonely outpost, lost in time, of a pattern of living whose scale can no longer be made to fit into ours.” It became something beyond the reach of a national imagination shrinking in cinema houses. In the  film based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling  novel Gone with the Wind, Hollywood focused public attention on eastern plantation culture just before the Civil War, a culture less sumptuous and nuanced than plantation life in Louisiana and Mississippi.⁵ The culture reflected in Belle Grove fit no Hollywood parameters: Belle Grove symbolized the world of an elite still absent from cinema houses. It symbolized an elite obsessed with power, especially glamour. While photographing the rear wing of Belle Grove in , Laughlin accidentally recorded something...