E. J. Bellocq was a commercial photographer of French Creole extraction who worked in New Orleans in the first decades of the century. In 1958 eighty-nine glass negatives of prostitutes in Storyville, the city's red-light district, were discovered in a chest. The negatives were eventually acquired and printed by the photographer Lee Friedlander, and comprise Bellocq's only known work other than a series of photographs for a World War I shipbuilding company. No prints from Bellocq's lifetime were found with the plates. In 1980 this photograph and two other vintage prints were discovered in New Orleans with the effects of Louis Danzig, a former cameraman for Pathé and Movietone News. Although it has not been documented, it is believed that Danzig knew Bellocq and received the prints directly from the photographer. But Bellocq had also had a secret life. After his death a collection of about one hundred plates was discovered in a drawer of his desk. The plates were portraits of New Orleans prostitutes. dating from about 1912. It is possible that the pictures were made as a commercial assignment, but this seems unlikely; they have about them a variety of conception and a sense of leisure in the making that identify them as work done for love. E.J.Bellocq: Photographs
Photography by Peter Gasser