Storyville portraits

In 1970 an obscure New Orleans commercial photographer, E. J. Bellocq (1873-1949), won posthumous cult status when his pictures of nude and clothed women, supposedly prostitutes from the Storyville red-light district, were exhibited at MoMA, New York. Taken c.1912, they had been printed by Lee Friedlander from 89 battered plates acquired from a New Orleans dealer. Relaxed poses and expressions, suggesting friendly familiarity with the photographer, differentiate most of them from either pornography or conventional portraiture. The nudity seems casual, unselfconscious, and mostly unalluring; one woman displays a conspicuous Caesarean scar. But various extraneous factors have given the pictures an exaggerated aura of strangeness and mystery. Some of the faces have been roughly obliterated. Blemishes on the plates, and Friedlander's soft, archaic printing method, convey a haunting, romantic quality. (Prints on modern paper look more prosaic.) Some of the backgrounds, settings, and poses seem incongruous, even ‘surreal’; there are naughty slogans, but also Christmas cards. But the images were evidently intended to be cropped. Finally, although tradition had described Bellocq as personally odd—in John Szarkowski's words, ‘a hydrocephalic semi-dwarf’—he was probably fairly ordinary. Not surprisingly, however, given their enigmatic origin, the photographs have prompted endless speculation and a novel, Peter Everett's Bellocq's Women (2000).

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits. Photographs from the New Orleans Red-Light District, circa 1912 (2nd edn. 1996).
• Malcolm, J., Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography (2nd edn. 1997)