Storyville Portraits/Bellocq's Ophelia

(Plate 2, circa 1912, EJ Bellocq, printed by Lee Friedlander, Storyville Portraits)

After reading a great essay on poets.org, I discovered a book called Bellocq's Ophelia written by Natasha Trethewey. It's a series of poems written as letters from a Storyville prostitute to her girlhood friend, now a schoolmarm in their rural hometown. Ophelia is black, but can pass. The letters reveal her path to the brothel and how she endures her time there. Trethewey meditates on "the gaze," those who wield it and those subject to it. At first, Ophelia is just a possession/thing to be looked at and be looked through. After her encounters with Bellocq, we see her reclaim her own gaze, her own "looking," and develop her skill of seeing through photography.

E.J. Bellocq was an early twentieth-century photographer who took a series of portraits of the workers of Storyville, a closed and legal district for prostitution in New Orleans. His glass negatives were discovered by Lee Friedlander, who reproduced and printed the portraits for the Museum of Modern Art. Trewethey was inspired by the portraits, and some poems are hung on the imagery of specific plates. I think it's phenomenal. Not only does she flesh out the women snapped by Bellocq, she has a sincere appreciation of how vision can be transformed/carried by a camera.

I highly recommend this slim volume of poetry. And, I recommend you get to your nearest library and find E.J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits and view the lovely pictures that inspired Ms. Trethewey. I knew of Bellocq and his portraits, especially from the cover of Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society by Nickie Roberts. [Those striped stockings are irresistible.]

"In his own way, in these pictures, Bellocq consummates many love affairs. Johnny Wiggs understood this when he saw, to his amazement, that Bellocq's prostitutes are beautiful....Beautiful innocently or tenderly or wickedly or joyfully or obscenely, but all beautiful, in the sense that they are present, unique, irreplaceable, believable, receptive. Each of these pictures is the product of a successful alliance.

A skillful photographer can photograph anything well. To do better than that he must photograph what he loves. Some love geometry; some love sunlight on mountains; some love the streets of their city. Bellocq apparently loved women, with the undiscriminating constancy of a genius. If he was in conventional terms impotent, he was in his eyes and spirit an indefatigable lover." ---John Szarkowski

I think Szarkowski is perceptive about a photographer's process (if chauvinistic in his pronouns), and I like that he understood that Bellocq saw prostitutes as living humans, not immobile objects to be used, ignored or shunned. If you're not familiar with Bellocq, he was oddly shaped, and that might have hindered any normal relationships with females. Bellocq paid the prostitutes for their time, but apparently not for sexual favors. It would be interesting to compare this series with Philip-Lorca diCorcia's series with male hookers.

Trethewey creating not only a poem, but a biography, that was framed by a previous work of art is fascinating to me. I recently heard someone describe historians as people who want to know about the unnamed, unmentioned and overlooked characters in the history books. I think artists pursue these questions as well, but instead of collecting facts, they dig for visual evidence (discovered or constructed).

Reading her poems, you will gain insight on what existence is like for "the other." You will recognize or begin to glean what it is like to be viewed with an assigned identity, not necessarily your own. And, what it's like for "the other" to walk with the included when the ability to blend in puts them--the included--at ease. The anxiety of waiting for them to finally notice your difference, and watching the behaviour perceptibly shift. Or, the included stumble over their prejudice, and "the other" speaks up and makes them aware the target is in their presence.

"October 1911"

Just the other day I fancied myself
a club woman, like you,
in my proper street clothes--

a new bow on my white straw hat,
my white linen jacket cleaned
and pressed, a modest bit of gingham

at the collar. So attired, I ventured out,
beyond the confines of the district,
to do my share of good deeds, visit

the sanatorium, a sick sister, her body
invaded by the invisible specter
of our work. Bellocq met me there,

set his camera to this scene: a woman
standing in the middle of the frame,
and off to the right, barely in the picture,

what she might become--the sick one
sleeping, hospital curtain pulled back,
only her face showing, disconnected

from the body she has begun to lose.
To the left, dressing gowns hanging empty
on the door. And beyond that door,

what you cannot see

Later, my visit over,
I walked out into bright afternoon, the sun
harsh, scouring everything--my face

the face a man recognized. (And here
I hesitate to tell you--) I was escorted
to the police station, guilty of being

where I was not allowed to be, a woman
notoriously abandoned to lewdness.
There, I posed for another lens, suffered

indecencies I cannot bear to describe.
You will not see those photographs--
paint smeared on my face, my hair

loosed and wild--a doppelganger
whose face I loathe but must confront.
I know now that if we choose

to keep any part of what is behind us,
we must take all of it, hold each moment
up to the light like a photograph--

this picture I send you of my good work,
a modest portrait for my mother,
even my rough image in a police file.

--Natasha Trethewey
Bellocq's Ophelia