Storyville Portrait

In the early years of the 20th century, the commercial photographer E. J. Bellocq made a series of strangely personal images in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans; many years later, the glass-plate negatives were discovered and printed by photographer Lee Friedlander. According to the accounts of jazz musicians and photographers who knew him, Bellocq was a difficult person. But he must have appealed to the inhabitants of the brothels, who collaborated with him on a series of intimate, revealing portraits that are anything but pornographic in effect. In many of Bellocq’s images, the identity is hidden, either by a mask or by purposeful damage to the negative; it is unknown whether the defacement was done by the photographer or by the women he photographed.