In my first blog entry, I would like to talk about E. J. Bellocq and his wonderful series of portraits of women who were prostitutes in the Red-Light District in New Orleans District of New Orleans around 1912.
Of the importance of Lee Friedlander and John Szarkowski in this matter and of the good eye of Larry Borenstein, who kept Bellocowski's plates preserved the Bellocq plates until they were discovered by Lee Friedlander.
“In his own way, in these images, Bellocq consummates many love affairs. Johnny Wiggs understood this when he saw to his astonishment that Bellocq's prostitutes are either beautiful, innocently beautiful or tender, with impudence or with mischief, or with gaiety, or with glee, or with obscenity. But all of them are beautiful, in the sense that they are present as something unique and irreplaceable, credible and receptive. Each of these images is the product of a successful alliance.”
“A skilled photographer can photograph anything well. To do even better than that, he must photograph what he loves. Some love geometry; some love sunlight in the mountains; some love the streets of their city. Bellocq apparently loved women, with the indiscriminate constancy of a genius. If in conventional terms he was impotent, he was in his eyes and spirit an indefatigable lover.”
John Szarkowski (director of photography at MOMA between 1962 and 1991)
Plate 1 . Photo E.J. Bellocq
Storyville was the name by which the Red-Light District of New Orleans was popularly known. Formerly known simply as "The District", it was a 38-block area where prostitution was permitted by the authorities, and it was Councilman Sidney Story who passed the decree. The nickname "Storyville" quickly gained popularity among the citizens and travellers who were users of the prostitution services provided there.
One of the familiar faces in Storyville was Ernest J. Bellocq, a successful commercial photographer who had his studio on nearby Canal Street.
Bellocq was the eldest of two brothers descended from a wealthy Creole family, his younger brother Leo Bellocq was a priest and this was the reason why it was initially suspected that he might be guilty of vandalising some of Bellocq's plates by scratching the faces of some of the women. This theory lost momentum as it made no sense to selectively scrape the faces of some women when it was easier to destroy all the fragile glass plates by simply smashing them to pieces on the ground.
Ernest and Leon Bellocq´s photos
Larry Borenstein was born in Milwaukee. He was of Russian descent and had made his fortune in New Orleans as an art dealer, some publications claim that he arrived in New Orleans on the night the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.
Larry Borenstein and Lee Friedlander met in 1958 while listening to the Kid Thomas Band in Larry's art room (now Preservation Hall) where renowned New Orleans jazz bands often rehearsed.
After the performance was over and the band was out of the room, the two stayed and chatted, and Borenstein showed the fragile glass plates to Friedlander for the first time.
The plates were found in the drawer of Bellocq's desk that was sold after his death, some of the plates were broken due to Hurricane Betsy's passage through New Orleans.
The following year Lee Friedlander returned to New Orleans to listen to some good jazz and photograph the artists, but Friedlander had made some enquiries about the plates that Larry Borenstein had shown him the year before and asked Borenstein if he could see the Bellocq plates again.
Larry Borenstein showed them to him a second time and this time he gave him an 8x10" copy of one of the plates which he sold to gallery clients for $100. Back in New York, Lee Friedlander could not get the beautiful images out of his mind. And in 1966 he decided to ask Borenstein if he would agree to sell him the plates or at least lend them to him to get some good prints.
Larry Borenstein agreed to sell them to him.
Lee Friedlander quickly realised that he could not use the traditional developing method he had been using until now and decided to develop them with a popular technique from the early 1900s called P.O.P. (Print Out Paper) where the plates are exposed to indirect daylight for 3 hours for seven days, then the paper is toned with gold chloride. With this method, Lee Friedlander succeeded in positivising 89 of E.J. Bellocq's Storyville plates.
As there were no known photographs developed by Bellocq himself at the time, Friedlander followed his own instinct and taste in developing.
On 19 November 1970, the exhibition of the Storyville portraits opened at the Museum of Modern Art of New York, giving Ernest J. Bellocq his rightful place in American documentary photography.
In one of Rafa Badia's master classes and talking about another of the great recent discoveries of American documentary photography, Vivian Maier, Rafa commented that it was inevitable to think about how many Vivian Maier or Bellocqs remain to be discovered and how many will have been lost forever.
Above is the M.O.M.A. press release about the exhibition.
In the Bellocq exhibition at the M.O.M.A., 39 of the 89 photographs taken by Lee Friedlander are on display, accompanied by snippets of conversations that the photographer had with what could be considered Bellocq's closest circle:
Dan Leyrer (photographer), Bill Russell (musician and jazz historian), Johnny Wiggs (cornet), Al Rose (writer and historian), Joe Sanarens (photographer and former banjo player), and Adele, one of the Storyville girls, although her identity is not mentioned in the book.
The general idea of all of them is that nobody really knew the photographer, although Adele insisted to Friedlander that Bellocq was always very nice to the girls and that he never asked them to pose in a dirty or lewd way, he simply photographed them as they wanted to appear in front of the camera, the girls were his muses and they perceived it as such, and it is this complicity between them that Bellocq's plates capture, making them unrepeatable.
Above these lines is the bedroom of E.J. Bellocq.