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John Ernest Joseph Bellocq
American, 1873-1949

John Ernest Joseph Bellocq was a professional photographer who worked in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Bellocq is remembered for his haunting photographs of the prostitutes of Storyville, New Orleans' legalized red light district. These have inspired novels, poems and films.

 E. J. Bellocq was a commercial photographer of French Creole extraction who worked in New Orleans in the first decades of the century. In 1958 eighty-nine glass negatives of prostitutes in Storyville, the city's red-light district, were discovered in a chest. The negatives were eventually acquired and printed by the photographer Lee Friedlander, and comprise Bellocq's only known work other than a series of photographs for a World War I shipbuilding company. No prints from Bellocq's lifetime were found with the plates. In 1980 this photograph and two other vintage prints were discovered in New Orleans with the effects of Louis Danzig, a former cameraman for Pathé and Movietone News. Although it has not been documented, it is believed that Danzig knew Bellocq and received the prints directly from the photographer.

Jazz may not have been born in Storyville, but it was incubated in its extravagant palaces and saloons. Between 1897 and 1917 Basin Street. the district's main drag, flourished, as did the country's only truly indigenous music. A woman who worked in a brothel was a jazz belle, her customer a jazz beau. The finer establishments were decorated with Oriental carpets, gilded mirrors, and crystal chandeliers, and guests were entertained with nightly music by the likes of Buddy Bolden, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, and King Oliver. By day, however, Storyville was quiet - a fact not lost on Bellocq, who worked with available light in the district's off-hours.

Bellocq's portraits show the women in various poses and degrees of undress, comfortable with their nudity and at ease in front of the camera; a few appear fully clothed, showing off their finest lace dresses and favorite pets. None of the photographs depict sexual acts or even suggest the presence of a man other than the photographer, whose pictures convey respect rather than voyeurism. This portrait is one of the most sexually frank of the series. The model's face and legs are masked, her pubic area exposed. She smiles, inviting the viewer for a ride on the raft of her chaise longue.Our knowledge of E. J. Bellocq barely transcends the level of rumor. This is true in the case of many exceptional photographers of the past, and it is especially true of professional photographers, who were less likely than amateurs (and perhaps less able) to write articles for the journals, or otherwise explain and publicize their work.

It is known that Bellocq was a commercial photographer in New Orleans during the early part of this century. During the First World War he was making what photographers call nuts-and-bolts pictures for a local shipbuilding firm. He is reported to have been a strange man in appearance and behavior: misshapen, anti-social, and humorless. He was regarded by his acquaintances as no more than a competent commercial photographer. As an old man, after retiring from the photography business, he is said to have walked the streets of New Orleans, attempting unsuccessfully to master the intricacies of the modern hand camera.

But Bellocq had also had a secret life. After his death a collection of about one hundred plates was discovered in a drawer of his desk. The plates were portraits of New Orleans prostitutes. dating from about 1912. It is possible that the pictures were made as a commercial assignment, but this seems unlikely; they have about them a variety of conception and a sense of leisure in the making that identify them as work done for love.

A good photographic portrait is the result of a successful collaboration between the photographer and the sitter. The remarkable individuality of Bellocq's portraits is the individuality of his subjects. With Bellocq's help. the women have realized themselves in pictures.

The prostitute portraits comprise the only fragment of Bellocq's work to have survived. About fifteen years after Bellocq's death the plates were shown to the photographer Lee Friedlander, who greatly admired them and later bought them. Since none of Bellocq's own prints survived to serve as models, Friedlander printed the plates in a process widely used sixty years ago, and appropriate to the character of Bellocq's negatives. Friedlander was thus the third collaborator to contribute to the work reproduced here.

Bellocq was born in a wealthy white Creole family in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He became known locally as an amateur photographer before setting himself up as a professional, making his living mostly by taking photographic records of landmarks and of ships and machinery for local companies. However, he also took personal photographs of the hidden side of local life, notably the opium dens in Chinatown and the prostitutes of Storyville. These were only known to a small number of his acquaintances. In the latter part of his life, he lived alone and acquired a reputation for eccentricity and unfriendliness. According to people who knew him in late life, he showed little interest in anything other than photography. In his early days, he was somewhat of a dandy.

Bellocq died in 1949 and was buried in Saint Louis Cemetery in New Orleans.

After his death, most of his negatives and prints were destroyed. However, the Storyville negatives were later found concealed in a sofa. In 1971, a selection of the photographs were published in a book entitled Storyville Portraits. They had been made into distinctive prints by Lee Friedlander, using the whole of the glass negatives. These photographs were immediately acclaimed for their unique poignancy and beauty.

A more extensive collection of Friedlander's prints, entitled Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, was published in 1996.

In recent times, a significant number of prints from Bellocq's own studio have come to light, these are typical professional photographs of the day, such as portraits and local views.

The Storyville Photographs

One of the deliberately damaged Storyville photographs

All the photographs are portraits of individual women. Some are nude, some dressed respectably, others posed as if acting a mysterious narrative. Many of the negatives were badly damaged, in part deliberately. This encouraged speculation about the reasons why they had been taken and later violated. Many of the faces had been scraped out; whether this was done by E. J. Bellocq himself, his Jesuit priest brother who inherited them after E. J.'s death, or someone else is unknown. However Bellocq himself is the most likely candidate, since the damage was done while the emulsion was still wet. In a few photographs the women wore masks. It is likely that the faces were scraped out for the same reason that masks were used - to protect the identities of the women.

Some prints made by Bellocq himself have since surfaced. These are far more conventional than the full-negative prints made by Friedlander.

The influence of Bellocq's violated negatives and bodies can be seen in the work of the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.

Bellocq in literature and film

The mysteries surrounding Bellocq have inspired several fictional versions of his life, notably the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby, in which Bellocq was played by Keith Carradine. He is also a character in Michael Ondaatje's novel Coming Through Slaughter and the central figure in Peter Everett's novel Bellocq's Women. All these works take considerable creative liberty, portraying a fictional Bellocq in many ways contrary to the known facts of his life and personality.

The photographs have also inspired imaginative literature about the women depicted in them. This includes several collections of poems, notably Brooke Bergan's Storyville: A Hidden Mirror and Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia.