Terrible Beauty: The Visual Poems of Clarence John Laughlin

The Final Act: Imitations of Piranessi The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 1981.247.1.1062

Bird of Hope, No. 2 The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 1981.247.1.2370

Before falling for photography, Clarence Laughlin had wanted to be a poet. As a young man he immersed himself in the French symbolists, particularly Baudelaire. Unable to sell his prose poems and wanting to quit his job as a bank teller, he bought an inexpensive camera, built a homemade darkroom and taught himself the fundamentals of photography. His goal was to be the Baudelaire of the camera. He called his early results “visual poems” and meant for the images to be explicated like poetry. For Laughlin, objects possessed an intricate web of psychological associations and a multitude of meanings.

While on a shoot, Laughlin recorded the time, date, location and the lighting conditions of each picture. His impressions of the images became captions that interpreted his photographs. The detailed placards mounted on the frames satisfied his ambitions as a writer, but they also dismayed critics and gallery owners who found the text intrusive. Laughlin usually won out, insisting that together picture and words created a complete form of expression.

Clarence John Laughlin was born in 1905 near the flat rice country of Lake Charles, Louisiana. His father was a rice planter, but according to Laughlin, “It didn’t work out,” so the family moved to New Orleans, where he found work at a syrup and molasses factory as a die caster. Clarence remained a resident of the city for most of his life.

When Laughlin was a child, his father took him to the public library and introduced him to children’s literature and fantasies, instilling in him a lifelong love of the written word. Books fascinated Laughlin, and he collected them as examples of art. At his death, his thirty-thousand-volume library included a range of subjects: sculpture, avant-garde periodicals, illustrated fairy tales and Victorian erotica

When his father died during the flu epidemic of 1918, fourteen-year-old Clarence dropped out of school and worked in a fruit and vegetable stand on Poydras Street to help support his mother and crippled, slightly retarded younger sister. He took correspondence courses at Louisiana State University but was largely self-educated. He was often defensive about his lack of formal education and resented academia after being rejected four times for a Guggenheim.

He spent the first ten years of his career as a photographer employed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Office of Strategic Services, work that allowed him to hone his technical skills. He also freelanced as an architectural photographer in the South and Midwest, taking photographs of houses, power plants, hospitals and office buildings. He was troubled by the postwar building boom. New Orleans was being transformed by bridges and floodgates built to control and exploit the Mississippi River. With his camera, Laughlin captured what he called “the mad clockwork tragedy of it all.”

The Obsessed The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 1981.247.1.730

A Nineteenth Century Regard The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 1981.247.1.300

Laughlin often wrote to photographers he admired. In 1935 he sent a letter and a print to Alfred Stieglitz, the father of twentieth-century photography, who replied with a kind but brief note. He also tried to get the notice of Man Ray, whose evocative visual experiments fascinated him. Man Ray, one of the original Dada and surrealist artists in Paris in the 1920s, responded to Laughlin’s work negatively. He wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that the less a work looks likes what is called a good photograph the more chance there is of there being something else in it. I base this assumption on what has occurred in painting, which...