Today was presentation day and I presented on J.E. Bellocq. I found him to be very interesting, initially I chose him from the famous photograph of the young lady in the striped stockings. But as I began to research him further more rumours and stories about him began to unfold that intrigued me. I learnt a lot from the presentations from the other students today, I only hope that I was able to do the same for them.
Ernest Joseph Bellocq or John Ernest Joseph Bellocq as he was also know, born in 1873 and died at the age of 79. He was born into a catholic creole French family who resided in the French quarters of the new Orleans. His father worked at a shipping company doing accounts, his mother kept house and his one brother became a priest.
Belllocq went to a private school and lead a very cultured life as he lived across the road from the opera. He followed in his fathers footsteps and worked at the shipping company doing accounts. Bellocq got itchy feet and longed for something better and more interesting. He pursued his interest in photography and took photos of ships, family gatherings, weddings and communions. This soon recognised him as an amateur photographer amongst the people of New Orleans. He ventured further taking photos of the New Orleans Mardi Gras and not long after made a name for himself as a professional photographer opening his own photography studio in town.
Not long after his father died his brother Leo move onto the priest hood and Bellocq moved out into his own apartment one and half blocks from Storyville. Storyville was renowned for it's legalised brothels and prostitution. Bellecq managed to befriend these women and gaining their trust they allowed him to photograph them clothed and naked. People in town speculated that these women allowed such thing because of his grotesque appearance and dwarf like stature. In reality Bellocq was quite an averaged size gentleman who was noticed for his red scarf that was almost his trade mark along with his femine style of jewelery that he wore.
Each day Bellocq would walk one and a half blocks to visit these women with his 8"x10" camera. He took a variety of pictures of these women being only Bellpocq and the one women in the room at a time. The women are portrayed as women who are working. Sexual acts or sex itself is all absent from Bellocqs photo's. The women seem to be totally trusting and at ease with Bellocq's presence and the task of having their photograph taken.
Bellocq not only photographed the women in the brothel he also photographed them when they were sick in the hospital. He had quite a relationship with these women. In his last days bellocq was leaving his studio when he collapsed in the street. He was taken to hospital were doctors said his days were numbered and that his condition was one of senility.
After Bellocq's death Leo his brother went to his apartment to collect his belongings and found them in disarray. Lamps were broken and furniture was upturned. In the back of a torn couch Leo found about 100 glass slides.
These slides were bought by Lee Friedlander twenty years later from a junk shop. unfortunately some of the glass slides were damaged due to hurricane Betsy. Friedlander restored the slides as best he could and reprinted the pictures. To his surprise some of the women in the pictures had their faces scratched out and were unrepairable. It was thought that Leo had scratched out these women's faces to protect their identity, but this proved not to be the case. The second theory was that Bellocq himself did it due to an affair with one of the women named 'Adele' often seen in the photographs holding a locket of sorts.
Friedlander published these photos into a book called 'Storyville Portraits'. There will be some unseen photos of Bellocq's work again published shortly.
A movie was also made of Bellocq's life in Storyville called 'Pretty Baby' starring Brooke Sheilds when she was a young girl. This movie caused a lot of controversy because of the age of Sheilds at the time and the content of the movie.
All in all none of what I have written has any truth as during 1911 and 1913 when Storyville legalised prostitution it also became know for Jazz music. Unfortunately someone didn't want history of New Orleans to become public so destroyed all evidence of what we can only now speculate upon.
“When I sought to learn more about Storyville and it contribution, if any, to the development of early jazz music, it didn’t take me long to discover why nobody had ever written a history of the area. The public library’s files of newspapers and periodicals had been vandalized, with countless issues clipped, very likely by persons who had stake in suppressing the information in them. In 1938, The TimesPicayuna threw out its files of photographs.”
