March 2024

A lavish new volume by John H. Lawrence celebrates an extraordinary collection of Louisiana images and the photographers who created them.

– by John S. Sledge 

images courtesy The Historic New Orleans Collection, Louisiana Lens.

Since its 1966 founding, The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC) has set the gold standard for research, publication, and curation of Gulf South history. Within its elegant French Quarter digs are over 30,000 books and a staggering two shelf-miles of manuscripts and documents, including colonial correspondence, enslavement records, 19th-century periodicals, prints, theater bills, construction documents, political pamphlets, postcards, and sheet music. 

Add to these the gilt-framed oil paintings, handsome maps, and beautifully preserved artifacts like pottery, porcelain, swords, firearms, furniture, musical instruments, glassware, jewelry, coats, hats, and dresses, and the visitor’s experience well-nigh verges on overload. Amid all these glories, it is easy to forget the fact that the Collection also holds half a million historic photographs.

Louisiana Lens: Photographs from The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC, $49.95) by John H. Lawrence aims to correct this common oversight. There could be no one better suited to this task than Lawrence, recently retired from THNOC after a stellar 46-year run. During his long tenure, Lawrence took a strong personal interest in photography and gathered many of the images now in the Collection.

In his introduction he writes, “Acquiring photographs was not a priority for Lewis Kemper Williams (1887-1971) and his wife Leila Hardie Moore Williams (1901-1966) as they began, in the 1930s, to assemble the trove of Louisiana historical materials that, following their deaths, would form the cornerstone of The Historic New Orleans Collection.”

Nonetheless, Lawrence observes that their early procurals did include two important photographic portfolios—those of Clarence John Laughlin, an avant-garde lens-master whose evocative 1948 book Ghosts Along the Mississippi now owns iconic status; and William C. Odiorne, an artist who befriended William Faulkner and took numerous French Quarter pictures during the 1920s. 

From that small but solid beginning, subsequent curators (including Lawrence after 1982), slowly added imagery “of documentary character by living and/or active practitioners,” though this was not official policy. After Hurricane Katrina clobbered the city in 2005, declares Lawrence, “an explosion of both documentary and expressive photographs,” many of them digital, put to rest any lingering doubts about contemporary photography’s importance and collectability.

Louisiana Lens is an attractive book that features 44 color and 131 black-and-white photographs. This is obviously the merest sampling of the Collection’s total, but it reflects Lawrence’s intent to offer a “more representative than encyclopedic” overview. The volume’s organization is chronological, beginning with early 19th-century daguerreotypes and advancing through ambrotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, gelatin silver prints, and on to contemporary digital shots. 

Each image appears on the right-facing page with a title, date, maker, medium, and catalog number below. A short essay appears left-facing. Lawrence occasionally touches on the various relevant processes like japanning metal and cyanotype printing, but happily, this is not a book about technique. For the most part, his essays are intelligent riffs, “for a thoughtfully made photograph is a spur to the imagination.” 

In some cases the photographer is unknown or little known beyond a name and a few facts, but the images never fail to evoke feelings, moods, and speculations. Exploring these allows Lawrence to effortlessly share tidbits gleaned from his vast knowledge of Louisiana history and culture.

The first image on display is a circa 1843 daguerreotype of the organ case at St. Patrick’s Church, possibly commissioned by architect James Gallier, who designed the church and many of its interior appointments. As pictures go this one is underwhelming—a ghostly-looking Gothic Revival contraption nestled beneath light fan vaulting—but it is the oldest picture in the Collection and perhaps the first taken in the city. 

Other early pictures include a river plantation house; a few compelling portraits like that of Shakespeare, a “Jamaica Negro,” taken in 1871; and an ambrotype of Canal Street’s 800 block in 1857 by James Andrews, who had a studio at Camp and Canal. In the latter, the architectural detail visible on the brick buildings and Christ Church is rich, but the foreground draws the viewer’s eye with its random scatter of lumber, stone, people, and carriages.

Every picture-taker one would expect in any canvas of Louisiana photography is here. Besides Laughlin and Odiorne, the reader encounters Ernest J. Bellocq (1873-1949), famous for his portraits of Storyville sex workers; Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), whose early 20th-century pictures of child laborers inspired reform; Walker Evans (1903-1975), who shot Bourbon Street during the 1930s; Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), a rare early female photographer with a gifted eye for French Quarter architecture; Sandra Russell Clark (b. 1949), employer of infrared film for atmospheric cemetery pictures; and Richard Sexton (b. 1954), auteur of riverine and landscape views that beautifully communicate a coastal vibe.

Some of the most arresting images in the book, however, are the work of lesser-known and, in a few cases, unknown photographers. These include a sunset view taken at Grand Isle in 1906 by John L. Haller (1874-1948); a color shot of a lieutenant in the Rex Organization taken in 1921, artist unknown; a 1963 shot of white female inmates in Orleans Parish Prison by Leonard Freed (1929-2006); and a picture of Vietnam War protesters. 

If Louisiana Lens has a money shot, the latter, titled “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, New Orleans, 1969” is it. Taken by Matt Anderson (b. 1948) for Tulane’s student newspaper The Hullabaloo, it is tightly focused on about a hundred people. Every visage is clearly discernable and suitably somber (except for one young woman toward the back flashing a smile). One can imagine Crescent City boomers making a parlor game out of identifying these protesters, most of whom were Tulane students at the time.

As with any volume of this sort, it is easy to note what is missing. Perhaps most surprisingly, there are no Civil War photographs, though the Collection must certainly hold its share. Likewise, no notable WW II imagery is included. Granted, the book does not pretend to be a documentary exercise, but these historical watersheds must have produced notable local imagery. One thinks of Union ironclads in the river or Andrew Jackson Higgins’ booming shipyards.

That said, Louisiana Lens is a delightful immersive experience. It is full of unexpected pleasures and thought-provoking themes for both local history connoisseurs and casual readers. John H. Lawrence has done a real service in highlighting a remarkably vibrant and significant photographic archive.