E.J. BELLOCQ

American, 1873 - 1949

Ernest Joseph Bellocq was an American photographer from Louisiana. During his lifetime, he worked as a commercial photographer, photographing landmarks, ships, and machinery for a variety of clients. In the early 1910s and in secret, he began creating his only known body of personal work: candid portraits of the sex workers of Storyville, the red light district of early 20th century New Orleans where illegal prostitution was tolerated. Bellocq’s portraits are notable for the carefree disposition of the women depicted and their sharpness, qualities not easily achieved with the glass plate negatives and long exposure times that constituted his process.

Bellocq’s photographs remained unknown until their acquisition by American photographer Lee Friedlander, who in 1966 discovered them in a New Orleans bookstore. From eighty-nine negatives, many in various states of disrepair, Friedlander produced 8 x 10 inch contact prints on the same gold tone printing-out paper that Bellocq had earlier used for his own. In 1970, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited these prints in the exhibition, E.J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits with an eponymous publication also released.

As written by Susan Sontag, “E.J. Bellocq's photographs of Storyville prostitutes became famous in 1970, when they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bellocq was more or less unknown before that, but with the show and the accompanying book, his mysterious, hauntingly beautiful portraits reached a wide audience, and Bellocq became a celebrated figure in the history of photography."