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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
E.J. Bellocq's enigmatic New Orleans whorehouse photos still inspire wonder.
Jan 25, 2002 | Our story begins in January 1898, when New Orleans Alderman Sidney Story made prostitution legal in a certain neighborhood in New Orleans. Wait. His ordinance didn't state prostitution was legal exactly. In fact, it said whoring was illegal in any neighborhood other than the blocks that stretched from Iberville Street to St. Louis Street and from North Robertson to North Basin.
Alderman Story was chagrined when the newspapers dubbed this new cathouse neighborhood "Storyville." Fourteen years later, in 1912, an allegedly deformed, Toulouse-Lautrec-like photographer took a series of sympathetic photographic portraits of a group of Storyville whores. (And 66 years later these photographs would be responsible for the unleashing upon America of a naked, prepubescent Brooke Shields in Louis Malle's 1978 film, "Pretty Baby," in which Shields and Susan Sarandon starred as the Storyville mother and daughter whores with whom shutterbug Keith Carradine is obsessed.)
A quarter of a century later, that movie has lost some of its cultural influence. But Ernest J. Bellocq's (1873-1949) Storyville work (which was only of women, not kids) continues to intrigue and mystify. An exhibition of 37 new prints (four never seen before) runs through Feb. 2 at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York's Chelsea neighborhood.
What is striking about these photos is how at ease most of the women appear, posing naked among the domestic clutter of their lives. In one case, a pleasantly nude woman poses with several large pillows decorated with a bulldog, a football and an American flag. A handout accompanying the Saul show reminds us that "many rooms in Storyville were decorated with a collegiate theme; this is probably a Mississippi State University or a Yale University pillow." As for these women's naked bodies, onlookers need to remember these assorted breasts and bellies predate Calista Flockhart, let alone Marilyn Monroe. In a recent New York Times review of the show, Vicki Goldberg felt the necessity to warn, "Some of the woman are slim and shapely, some dumpy with distinctly overripe curves." "Dumpy" is a modern-day judgment, and perhaps the wrong term to describe female body image c. 1912.
That said, Bellocq's story really begins with his death in 1949, after he had become a senile photographer who took photos of boats. A jazz-loving junkman named Larry Borenstein found Bellocq's old glass negatives (glass plates were coated with light-sensitive silver salts and used to create instant negatives) and showed them to a Storyville historian named Al Rose. Then a photographer named Dan Leyrer, who claimed to have known Bellocq in the old days, made prints from the glass negatives.
Enter photographer Lee Friedlander, who heard about Borenstein's prints in either the 1950s (so says Susan Sontag) or in the mid-'60s (as say various press releases). Either way, Friedlander bought all 89 negatives and then went to Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., to study how to print the damn things. Friedlander -- well known for his photos of beat and jazz musicians -- also became interested in taking Robert Frank-influenced street and motel photographs.
In 1967 the Museum of Modern Art's photography curator, John Szarkowski, included Friedlander in the notorious "New Documents" exhibition, the show that introduced the general public to the nudist camp freaks of Diane Arbus. In 1970, Szarkowski and Friedlander successfully presented Friedlander's prints of the Bellocq negatives to America. The MoMA exhibition catalog contained a loose transcript of tape-recorded conversations that Friedlander had conducted with various characters who claimed to have known Bellocq. Johnny Wiggs, a New Orleans cornetist, remembered that Bellocq possessed a pyramid-shaped head. Another witness claimed Bellocq was a hunched-over dwarf. The official MoMA portrait of Bellocq was that of a deformed freak, an asexual outcast the Storyville whores felt comfortable posing for because they were social outcasts as well. But this was a very 1970s view.
