ART REVIEWS : Different Worlds, Dramatic Visions : County Museum of Art: Clarence John Laughlin’s photographs of the lush and mournful South reflect his own bittersweet upbringing in New Orleans.

Artworks are rather like dreams made visible. Freud once said that if he could completely understand a patient’s first reported dream he would know the person fully. Maybe that’s also true of artworks.

Clarence John Laughlin was a photographer, autodidact and frustrated author who worked out of New Orleans, where he died in 1985 at age 79. His first embodied dream was a picture of a house at 720 General Pershing St. taken in 1930. Of it he wrote, “My very first negative. Not a very auspicious beginning. Showing rear of ‘shot-gun’ cottage where my family lived for over 20 years. My father died in this house on October 20, 1918.”

The image is reproduced in the catalogue for a 130-work retrospective opening today at the County Museum of Art on a 12-city tour that originated at the Hallmark Photographic Collection in Kansas City.

Laughlin’s been a known quantity in American photography for decades, but not well known. He seems pertinent today as an American early involved with Surrealist-tinged imagery. It has a lot to say about the lush, mournful South. Today, it looks like an early bellwether of a recent trend to staged photos and a revival of photographic romanticism.

Laughlin made more than 17,000 pictures in his long career. Most were better than the first one but, significantly, well over half were images of buildings. He made his living as an architectural photographer. Even given his own head, he loved to record the images of ruined or decayed structures, like his superb shot of Belle Grove Plantation taken in 1952 the morning after it burned to a skeleton. Despite all that’s written about artists’ growth and innovation, most careers consist of endless variations on a few central obsessions.

Laughlin’s first picture gives us the picture of his hallucinatory preoccupations--memory, loss, decomposition and death. An analyst might have predicted this from his beginnings. The family farm was lost when Clarence was 5. The Laughlins moved to New Orleans, where father worked making wooden molds for machine parts. Laughlin’s photos are full of factories and machine parts.

Dad caught influenza when Clarence was 13. A priest assured the boy he’d be all right. He died anyway. Laughlin’s photos are full of cemeteries and blighted storefront black churches. A bright kid, he nonetheless had to drop out of high school at 15 to work at unpleasant jobs to help support his mother and sister. He escaped into reading books of illustrated fantasy, eventually graduating to an admiration for Baudelaire. Odd that it wasn’t Edgar Allan Poe, the sometimes-Southern American ancestor of the French Symbolists. Laughlin seems to have more in common with him, including a tendency to wax overwrought and theatrical.

Every artist can be explained with a thumbnail psychological sketch, but they cannot be thus explained away. Every artist can be dinged for inevitable shortcomings, but they cannot be thus dismissed.

Laughlin never made it as the writer he longed to be but that didn’t stop him from concocting long and sometimes quite crackpot captions for his pictures. In one particularly winceable 1941 example he shows a veiled mannequin, its arm upraised in a ruined building. He called it, “The Nazi Puppets” and wrote a diatribe against people who follow dictators.

His heart was in the right place but this exercise proves that artists frequently have an imperfect understanding of what their work expresses. William Blake could put word and image together. Laughlin would have been better off to keep his pen sheathed. He was too inclined to get himself wrong as in his repeated habit of taking some mournful, elegiac image and cheerfully dubbing it a “satire.”

Laughlin wanted to be an artist of his time but he just kept slipping away into the past. When we read that such-and-such an image was made just as “the war” broke out, we can scarely believe it was World War II. We might believe World War I or the Civil War.

Wait. That’s not quite right. There is something persistently genteel and Victorian about Laughlin’s art but it does become modern in that all the cobwebbed skeletons kept in the Victorian closet are let out to haunt us. Later, Bruce Conner and Ed Kienholz would get some of the same feel into their assemblages.

Sexual fears materialize as a scantily clad mannequin is shot so as to appear as a Gargantuan mindless amazon towering taller than skyscrapers. An auto headlight becomes an evil eye awash in reflections on the fender. Like the more delicate Joseph Cornell, Laughlin did have an eye for the magic of things. It shows in a “Gone With the Wind” apparition called “The Memory of Things Long Ago.”

His real gifts do not show to best advantage in staged shots like “The Introverts,” which looks like bad Tennessee Williams. Laughlin’s best work comes from his ability to find strangeness and enchantment in things as they are--the woozy visual mystery of a spiral staircase that detaches into a whirlpool abstraction and becomes the shell of a chambered nautilus without his changing a thing. The wistful charm of early Truman Capote inhabits Laughlin’s image of a Greek-style statue entwined with ivy. Unfortunately, he insisted on calling it “The Bashful Discus Thrower.”

The catalogue calls Laughlin a “visionary”--often artspeak code for “lovable eccentric.” In the end there is nothing wrong with that. Excess can be endearing and without it Laughlin would likely not have struck the extrasensory qualities found in his unforced work. Where else can one see the gentle drama of life’s evolutionary decay so neatly expressed as in his shot of the forest slowly covering classical columns in “The Enigma”? He even had something apt to say about Los Angeles in capturing the lacy tracery of the Bradbury Building or the weirdness of an old carpenter Gothic house on Sunset Boulevard.

The latter stands on a hill like a spinster’s citadel flanked by two dinosaur palm trees while a ghostly man below looks like a Giacometti sculpture on the prowl.

It’s one of those exhibitions that make the day look different when you leave the museum.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to July 21. Closed Mondays. (213) 857-6000.