E.J. Bellocq from the Storyville collection. Deborah Bell Gallery. ©

E.J,Bellocq from the Storyville Portraits collection. D.Bell Gallery. ©

E.J. Bellocq Storyville Portraits collection.

From Photograph Magazine:

“Selections from E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville portraits, images of prostitutes from New Orleans’s Storyville neighborhood, from 1912, go on view at Deborah Bell Gallery, 16 E. 71st Street. NYC on February 15.

“Bellocq, a native of New Orleans Creole community, died in 1949, and in 1958, 89 glass-plate negatives were found in his desk, all of which were acquired nine years later by Lee Friedlander, who reprinted them using the same printing-out paper that Bellocq had used in his rare prints. Bellocq himself was a somewhat enigmatic character (a commercial photographer, he was thought to have hydrocephalus), but his candid portraits showed his subjects  at ease with him and at home in their surroundings.”

Bellocq worked as a commercial photographer of ships and buildings, but he also had his personal work with images of the shadowy NO cultures including the prostitutes of the Storyville district where prostitution was legal and the Chinatown opium dens.

The working girls seemed comfortable with him as noted above.  They agreed to be photographed nude and clothed.

He did not achieve fame in his lifetime.  Lee Friedlander, a famous photographer in his own right, made the Storyville prints, and they were first exhibited at a 1970 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized by Friedlander who later (1996) published a book of Bellocq’s work.

JIMMY BUFFETT.  (Live in New Orleans. 2008,  Jazz Fest) ALLEN TOUSSAINT on piano.    The album is Encores with music performed at the end of Jimmy’s concerts.

–Paul Goldfinger, Photography Editor.  Blogfinger.net. February 11, 2020.