E.J. Bellocq: The Photographer of Storyville's Secret World

The Photographer of Storyville's Secret World

Ernest Joseph Bellocq was born in 1873 in New Orleans to an aristocratic Louisiana Creole family. He worked clerical jobs before becoming a professional photographer around 1902, running a commercial studio that handled the mundane work of architecture photography, portraits, and museum documentation. By day, E.J. Bellocq was a working photographer in a city full of them. But in private, he was creating one of the most haunting bodies of photographic work in American history.

The Storyville Portraits

Sometime in the early 1900s, Bellocq began photographing women in Storyville — New Orleans' legalized red-light district, which operated from 1897 to 1917. Using an 8x10-inch view camera, he made glass plate negatives of the women who lived and worked there. Some were clothed, some were not. The photographs are remarkable not for their subject matter but for their intimacy and humanity. These were portraits, not exploitation — the women look directly at the camera with expressions that range from playful to weary to defiant.

Many of the negatives were deliberately defaced — faces scratched away while the emulsion was still wet. Bellocq himself likely did the scratching, though nobody knows why. Perhaps he was protecting the women's identities. Perhaps he was ashamed. Perhaps he simply couldn't reconcile the beauty of the photographs with the world they depicted.

Discovery and Legacy

After Bellocq's death in 1949, his glass negatives were nearly lost. They were considered pornographic and illegal, so they weren't listed in his estate. Photographer Lee Friedlander acquired them in 1967 and began making prints. A 1970 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art introduced Bellocq's work to the world. Susan Sontag wrote the introduction to the 1996 publication of the photographs.

Louis Malle's 1978 film Pretty Baby, starring Keith Carradine as Bellocq, brought his story to a wider audience. Michael Ondaatje's novel Coming Through Slaughter wove his legend further. E.J. Bellocq photographed a world that New Orleans created and then erased, and his images are the closest we'll ever come to seeing Storyville as it actually was — beautiful, complicated, and impossible to look away from.