Image by E.J. Bellocq © Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
E.J. Bellocq, Storyville Portrait, ca. 1912.
The peculiar looking man walks over to his 8x10 inch view camera, inserts a glass plate that has been pre-emulsified with a gelatin coating, and opens the shutter—which exposes the plate to light. The subject remains still. Comfortable. Undaunted. After a while, the light causes the silver nitrates on the glass plate to dance around and bombard one another, producing a chemical reaction that captures the image the camera is chasing. Once caught, the photographer stores the glass plate to be developed for later use and the subject goes about her business as usual. But the image—the image is now arrested in time. Immortal.
The subject, and many others like her, was a product of Storyville. New Orleans’s notorious red-light district thrived from 1896 to 1917 as an attempt to temper the vice of the city by containing it in a sixteen-square-block area toward the back of town. Dubbed “Storyville” after Alderman Sidney Story, who championed the idea, the area debuted with a procession of naked prostitutes parading down Canal Street to their new “home” while men hooted and hollered. The unrestricted Storyville was home to over two hundred brothels, a couple thousand ladies of the night, and a collective of professional musicians playing a boisterous version of ragtime and big-band music, a sonic embodiment of the Afro-Caribbean culture that found a home in the Crescent City. The music was being played freely, without constraints, breathing and swinging, the rhythms of the night. They’d eventually call it Jazz.
But perhaps just as mysterious and enigmatic as the lady in the photo, was the man behind the lens. Ernest J. Bellocq, a professional photographer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, took eighty-nine such photos of the ladies of Storyville. By day, he made his living taking pictures of homes, school class photos, and prints for the shipyards in New Orleans. But in his free time, Bellocq aimed to capture the darker sides of his city, including the opium dens of New Orleans’ Chinatown (although those images have never been found). And Storyville was just a few blocks from his home.
After Bellocq’s death, his glass plates—never shown to anyone—serendipitously found their way into the hands of a New Orleans art dealer named Larry Borenstein, an antique collector who discovered them in a shop in New Orleans. (Borenstein’s own gallery eventually became home to the Quarter’s house of Jazz, Preservation Hall.) Borenstein sold the plates to photographer Lee Friedlander, who developed the negatives and brought them to New York City to be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. Over the years, people have been drawn to the distinct quality of the photos and the relaxed nature of the subjects. Though the pictures were taken in the notorious brothels of the day, there is a wholesome nature to them.
“He always behaved nice. You know, polite….
I don’t know if he ever wanted to do nothing but look.”
—Adele, Storyville Prostitute, commenting on E.J. Bellocq
Since then, much has been made of these photos and their significance to New Orleans and the time period, granting Ernest J. Bellocq significant posthumous fame. He and his photos have inspired poems, articles, books, and even the 1976 film, Pretty Baby—which starred a twelve-year-old Brook Shields in a salacious and controversial role as a child prostitute and David Carradine, playing a debonair Ernest J. Bellocq, the object of her affection.
Despite his status as a cultural icon, quite little is actually known about Bellocq, personally or professionally. Much of what we think we know about the man comes from a composite sketch of Bellocq’s characteristics that were told to Friedlander and presented in his exhibition. In it, alleged contemporaries of Bellocq painted a portrait of a man with a rather large head, a curious walk, a high-pitched voice, and with a “sit-down place that was rather wide.” Some even went so far as to claim Bellocq might have suffered from hydrocephalus—an enlarging of the brain. It was also claimed that he was a bit aloof and hard to get along with, only opening up to people if they talked to him about certain points of interest, like photography.
Because this portrayal is all we know of Bellocq, most of the contemporary art inspired by him (with the exception of the aforementioned Pretty Baby) used these characteristics to portray the man as some scourge of society—a simpleton with a large head and silly walk, prone to fits of anger and hard to befriend.
So, are these depictions an accurate representation of the man, or are they apocryphal opinions of a few acquaintances interviewed twenty years after his death? Rex Rose, in his article, “The Last Days of Ernest J. Bellocq,” disputes the idea that Bellocq was a simple-minded hydrocephalic dwarf, noting that he was about average height for the time, that his facial structure—in one of the best pictures of Bellocq—shows no signs of abnormalities associated with the disease, and his success as a commercial photographer during his lifetime makes the idea that he was at all mentally challenged implausible.
Here is what we do know:
Bellocq became a member of the New Orleans Camera Club in 1891, and his photos often appeared in local newspapers. Although less famous than he is today, Bellocq was very much a part of New Orleans society, considered a prominent young photographer frequently capturing images of boxers and baseball players who passed through town, as well as various New Orleanians’ homes. He was born to an aristocratic family, was well educated, and had the luxury of choosing a profession in its infancy.
According to Bellocq’s death certificate, he died at age seventy-six on October 3, 1949 from an accidental fall occurring at the Federal Reserve Bank, which left a lacerated wound to his scalp and led to swelling in his brain. He died two weeks after the fall at Mercy Hospital. The report gave no indication of hydrocephalus or any other condition at the time of his death. Is it possible that the edema of the brain resulting in his death might be the impetus for the notion that he suffered from hydrocephalus throughout his lifetime? That is a question to which we will probably never have an answer.
An arguably more intriguing mystery is that of Bellocq’s purpose for these iconic photographs. Some suggest that the pictures were for promotional materials for the brothels where the women worked, but none were ever used for this purpose. A few negatives were even found with the faces of the women scratched out, yet no one knows for certain who did this or why. Some have suggested that Bellocq’s brother, a Jesuit Priest, may have scraped the photos; however, it seems unlikely that he would have defaced some and left the others. It is more likely that Bellocq himself marred the images, but to what end remains an enigma.
[Read this next: Did Bernard de Marigny Really Bring the game of Craps to the New World?]
In the photos, the women appear comfortable with Bellocq, perhaps because they considered him a kindred spirit, a union of the dregs of society, a person disregarded by the social elite, but still holding his own hopes and dreams as they did. Or simply because they came to trust him.
Approaching forty when the photos were taken, Bellocq was no longer an up-and-coming photographer, yet the women allowed him into their world and permitted him to be a conduit for their inner feelings, a liaison to the outside world. Part of the reasons the images have so captured people’s imaginations this past century is that they are more than photographs of prostitutes, objects of male desire; they are photographs of women, each possessing depth and individuality.
Whether Bellocq was a curious figure with a high-pitched voice and large head or a debonair, aristocratic character able to persuade ladies of the night to pose for his camera, we will likely never know.
Perhaps he was simply a talented photographer, keen on taking pictures of subjects which he found personally appealing. Or possibly, through his own creative lens, he saw things that the outside world ignored, and captured them for posterity. As with the photographs he left us, we will have to form our own opinions, our own theories, with only clues culled from the ashes of time.
