Nobody knows much about E. J. Bellocq, an unexceptional commercial photographer who lived in New Orleans shortly after the turn of the century. He took a lot of pictures of boats to pay the rent. He was an odd, indrawn, misshapen man, hydrocephalic and a dwarf. According to another photographer who knew Bellocq, “he had a terrific [French] accent, spoke in a high-pitched voice, staccato-like, and when he got excited he sounded like an angry squirrel.”
The one thing that is known about Bellocq for sure is that he liked to hang out in Storyville, New Orleans’s legalized red light district that thrived from 1896 (when it was set up by an anti-vice New Orleans alderman, Sidney Story, in an attempt to limit prostitution to one section of town) until it was closed down in 1917.
Bellocq, the misshapen outcast, seems to have found a home of sorts in the unpretentious and forgiving surroundings of red light counterculture. According to one woman who worked in Storyville and was interviewed about Bellocq some fifty years later, “he always behaved nice. You know, polite…. I don’t know if he ever wanted to do nothing but look.”
In any case, around 1912 Bellocq took a remarkable series of portraits of various prostitutes from Storyville. The glass plates were discovered after Bellocq’s death and eventually purchased by photographer Lee Friedlander, who found them quite remarkable. In 1970 Friedlander curated a show of Bellocq’s Storyville photos for New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A book of the photos, Storyville Portraits, was also published by the Museum at that time. This fall, fifteen of the photos were shown again at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, commemorating the publication of a beautiful new, enlarged printed edition of Bellocq’s images, Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans (Random House, 84 pages, $60).
There is nothing particularly glamorous or titillating about Bellocq’s photographs and, indeed, nothing particularly glamorous or titillating about the women who are its subjects. This is precisely what makes the photos so extraordinary. We see the women of Storyville, not all dolled up for their clients, but simply at home, being themselves. We see a variety of women — younger, older, heavier, thinner, clothed, unclothed, seductive, distant, joyous, troubled, relaxed in front of the camera, decidedly ill-at-ease. We see the uninflated, yet powerful, presence of a group of women who, simply enough, worked as prostitutes in New Orleans shortly before World War I.
The surroundings in the photos are generally meager, even dismal –plain rooms with flowered wallpapers, sometimes minimally decorated with college pennants or small mimentoes. The quality of the photographic plates reinforces the mood. Many are scratched, peeling, stained, or broken. Some have sections that are missing entirely. In most of the nude photographs, the women’s faces have been crudely, almost violently, scratched away entirely — perhaps by Bellocq himself, perhaps to protect their identities. And yet there is a basic kind of grounded sensuality that the women in these photos convey, quite different from the affectedly mirthful conventions of the classic pinup or the coy French postcard. It is the sensuality of women at ease with themselves and with the sexuality of their bodies, an ease that was hardly typical of women of their time. Women in 1912, after all, did not sit around, quietly nude and relaxed, before a camera, before a stranger, before anyone — generally not even before their husbands. Except, of course, in Storyville. Except when they were sitting for Bellocq.
However strange Bellocq may have been — maybe precisely because he was so strange, because he was so much of a fellow outcast — he had the sensitivity, the unequivocal acceptance, the appreciation, to allow these women to feel at home being seen through his eye and through his lens. And as a result, eighty years later, we have the opportunity to see these women, to see something about who they were, that would otherwise have disappeared with them into the grave.
Libido magazine, Spring, 1997
Copyright © 1997 David Steinerg
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