These are photographs by E.J. Bellocq, a photographer who captured New Orlean’s legal red district, known as Storyville, during the early twentieth century. Bellocq photographed portraits of Storyville prostitutes, some clothed, some nude, some masked, and some defaced. Though he died unknown, photographer Lee Friedlander discovered Bellocq’s negatives and was the main instrument for printing and exhibiting Bellocq’s work. Friedlander’s prints were exhibited by curator John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, along with an accompanying catalog. These photographs come from a later book, Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, published in 1996 with an introduction by Susan Sontag.
There is only a single subject per picture (except for one photograph of two champagne drinkers playing a card game) and Bellocq rarely comes in close to his subject. Typically, he photographs his subjects in full figure. Sontag comments: “Bellocq’s photographs belong to this same world of anti-formulaic, anti-salacious sympathy for ‘fallen’ women, though in his case, we can only speculate about the origin of that sympathy.” Despite the subject matter, it’s clear from the portraits that Bellocq had a certain level of access to these women, to such a degree that they would be at ease and comfortable in front of his camera. “Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn’t have dictated to them how they should pose—whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer, or absent the customer, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were.”
When I was first introduced to Bellocq’s work last fall, I was most haunted by the negatives that were deliberately scratched out, the woman defaced. No one knows who destroyed the negatives, but some critics guess that it was Bellocq himself in order to protect the identity of his subjects. Sontag similarly reflects on the defaced photographs: “The only pictures that do seem salacious—or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute’s life—are those on which the faces have been scratched out. These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for the viewer. But then I am a woman, and unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic ease, and the tangibleness of their vanished world.”
Looking through “Photographs from Storyville” this weekend, I was struck by how my background knowledge of the subject matter influenced my reading of the entire series. His photographs feature women in a range of dress and poses, and knowing that these were shot in a brothel changes our interpretation of each photograph, even when the women are fully clothed or simply playing a game. The image above, for example, is at once a beautiful collection and homage to a group of women. At the same time, there is a darker read, where this photographic collection is actually an advertising wall, where a customer can select a woman for purchase. Sontag argues that Bellocq’s work has value precisely because it is a series, a group of photographs instead of a single portrait: “Central to the impression the pictures make on us is that there are a large number of them, with the same setting and cast in a variety of poses, from the most natural to the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress/undress. That they are part of a series is what gives the photographs their integrity, their depth, their meaning. Each individual picture is informed by the meaning that attaches to the whole group.”
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