Plate 29 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

She’s naked, with her back to me, standing on a bare floor, facing a bare wall. Her toes touch its skirting board. Her right hand is raised to the scratched outline of a butterfly on the wall. Her face, which was presumably once visible in profile, has been scratched off the glass-plate negative. I see no reason to infer sinister motives for this. Whoever did it – not necessarily Bellocq – may have wanted to protect the woman’s identity, perhaps at her request. Other ruptures in the image’s integrity are more obviously the work of chance. There’s a jagged splinter in the shape of a knife blade missing in the upper left corner and a faint scratch over the tendon on her right heel. Another scratch accompanies a detached flake of emulsion on her right buttock. It looks like a parody of an eighteenth-century beauty spot.

Plate 1 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

She’s topless, with the gown drawn down from the shoulders to form a shallow ‘V’ underneath the breasts. Her eyeline moves out of the left side of the frame, and she’s sitting at a slight angle to the camera. As is often the case when Bellocq uses a white screen as a backdrop, he doesn’t crop the frame accordingly, so the screen remains clearly identifiable, floating unfocussed in the background. Two corners of the plate are missing, leaving angular, black shapes on the print that cut sharply into the screen’s diffused outline and complement the angles of the gown’s bunched fabric. Her hair is arranged and parted neatly, with only a single loose wisp behind her left ear. Her complexion is clear and even. She has nothing to protect or individuate herself – no prop or pet or costume – and yet she looks perfectly at ease. Who or what is she smiling at?

Plate 18 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

She’s pinned to the plane of focus – a soldier at attention. She’s naked and prostrate, but she concedes the minimum possible surface area to the camera. She doesn’t hide her breasts or genitals, but she isn’t exactly displaying them either. She’s on her side on a couch, her head supported by a cushion. Her hair merges into deep shadow below her left shoulder. Her right arm twists out of sight, locked behind her hip. Her left arm is squashed into the couch below her, its half-clenched fingers amputated by foreshortening. Her bare feet are dirty. The couch appears to have some kind of covering, into which her left thigh merges, but the insulation isn’t very thick. I imagine that the rattan imprints its pattern on her skin. The shadows underneath the couch are almost blank, as if it’s magically suspended, and the emulsion has disintegrated over her right hip, as it has elsewhere on the plate, leaving nebulous clouds of anti-matter in the air above and around her. A crack in the glass bisects her torso but swerves aside from her face, which retains every detail. She looks at me calmly, steadily, with neither pride nor resignation.

Plate 17 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

The spirals stand for intoxication: the shot glass in her right hand, obscured by motion blur, and the bottle of Raleigh Rye on the table that supports her left elbow. The shape is everywhere: in the lathed table legs, the drapery of an erect statue of a dancing woman at the table’s centre, and (more subtly) in the twist of her striped stocking as it passes over her knee. Her legs are crossed. The left is on top, and—like the shot glass—it’s marred by a barely perceptible blur, as if she’s tapping her foot to a tune in her head.

The diaphanous garment draped over her upper half is neither a dress nor a blouse. I can’t even tell where it ends. Her hair’s pinned up, but not rigorously. Her expression’s neutral, but relaxed.

The chair is a bit more than functional, because there are elaborate turnings on the leg shapes, and a triple stretcher between the legs. The table is even fancier. A piece of white lace displays a tableau of objects. An alarm clock—very useful in a brothel. Then there’s the imposing statue, the bottle (its position coinciding exactly with the plane of focus), an apple, and an identified object at the right. Underneath the table, on a shelf suspended between its legs, are a series of miniature wooden chairs. Each has two feathers attached to its rear of the stile at the top, one on each side. These miniature chairs look like trinkets, the sort of thing one purchases from a child street vendor.

There’s a large, floor-length window on the right with the blind drawn up. Just possibly, it’s a door, not a window. That’s the light source for the photograph. No flash: indirect, barely touching, but definitive nonetheless.

There’s a wall behind her, parallel to the plane of focus. On the wall are six pictures—a seventh may be arranged as a sort of pendant to one of the six. Since the wall is out-of-focus, the subjects are unidentifiable, but at least two are cameo portraits of women. The others might be erotic, but they’re not pornographic: the same could be said of this photograph.

Bellocq normally composes with the subject dead centre, but here she’s displaced to the photographer’s left, or rather the subject is not the woman in and of herself, but the unity of woman, chair and table, the last two indispensable supports to her (literally) shaky sense of self.

It’s possible that Bellocq has caught her off-guard, in mid-blink. But that’s accidental. An honest mistake, between friends.

E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

The only surviving photographs by E. J. Bellocq are eighty-nine glass plate negatives of prostitutes, which were taken c. 1912 in the Storyville district of New Orleans – the birthplace of modern jazz. These images were never displayed during Bellocq’s lifetime, and were only discovered by chance after his death. Lee Friedlander obtained the negatives in the 1960’s, and by painstaking experimentation with obsolete papers, he managed to obtain useable prints from them. A selection of these prints was published for the first time in 1970, in the volume Storyville Portraits. [1]

A lengthy essay by Nan Goldin, which summarises the results of recent research on Bellocq, as well as describing Goldin's own response to his work, can be found at the website American Suburb X, here (the essay was originally published in ArtForum in 1997).

My next four blog entries will be dedicated to Bellocq's photographs.

[1] A volume with a larger selection of Bellocq's images was published in 1996, but it appears from Amazon that this is already out of print, and that the 1970 version of Storyville Portraits (which I own) is more readily available second-hand.