E.J.Bellocq
				American, 1873-1949
		Website about the artist: www.corpse.org
			Introduction
			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. Jazz may not have been born in Storyville, but it was incubated in its extravagant palaces and saloons. Between 1897 and 1917 Basin Street. the district's main drag, flourished, as did the country's only truly indigenous music. A woman who worked in a brothel was a jazz belle, her customer a jazz beau. The finer establishments were decorated with Oriental carpets, gilded mirrors, and crystal chandeliers, and guests were entertained with nightly music by the likes of Buddy Bolden, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, and King Oliver. By day, however, Storyville was quiet - a fact not lost on Bellocq, who worked with available light in the district's off-hours. Bellocq's portraits show the women in various poses and degrees of undress, comfortable with their nudity and at ease in front of the camera; a few appear fully clothed, showing off their finest lace dresses and favorite pets. None of the photographs depict sexual acts or even suggest the presence of a man other than the photographer, whose pictures convey respect rather than voyeurism. This portrait is one of the most sexually frank of the series. The model's face and legs are masked, her pubic area exposed. She smiles, inviting the viewer for a ride on the raft of her chaise longue.Our knowledge of E. J. Bellocq barely transcends the level of rumor. This is true in the case of many exceptional photographers of the past, and it is especially true of professional photographers, who were less likely than amateurs (and perhaps less able) to write articles for the journals, or otherwise explain and publicize their work. It is known that Bellocq was a commercial photographer in New Orleans during the early part of this century. During the First World War he was making what photographers call nuts-and-bolts pictures for a local shipbuilding firm. He is reported to have been a strange man in appearance and behavior: misshapen, anti-social, and humorless. He was regarded by his acquaintances as no more than a competent commercial photographer. As an old man, after retiring from the photography business, he is said to have walked the streets of New Orleans, attempting unsuccessfully to master the intricacies of the modern hand camera. 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. A good photographic portrait is the result of a successful collaboration between the photographer and the sitter. The remarkable individuality of Bellocq's portraits is the individuality of his subjects. With Bellocq's help. the women have realized themselves in pictures. The prostitute portraits comprise the only fragment of Bellocq's work to have survived. About fifteen years after Bellocq's death the plates were shown to the photographer Lee Friedlander, who greatly admired them and later bought them. Since none of Bellocq's own prints survived to serve as models, Friedlander printed the plates in a process widely used sixty years ago, and appropriate to the character of Bellocq's negatives. Friedlander was thus the third collaborator to contribute to the work reproduced here.