[Storyville Portrait]

E. J. Bellocq American
 Printer Lee Friedlander American

Not on view

In 1896 New Orleans’s alderman Sidney Story attempted to manage the city’s rampant prostitution by creating a legally protected red-light district that became known as Storyville. Bellocq’s portraits of the district’s working-class women were virtually forgotten until the 1960s. Many of the negatives were heavily scratched, obscuring the womens’s faces, as seen here. Often, the act of removing a
figure from a photograph is an attempt to erase that person from memory through literal defacement. In New Orleans, however, hidden identities, masks, and costumes play an important role in carnival celebrations, when society’s class and moral constraints are traditionally loosened. Was someone merely trying to protect this model’s anonymity, or are the scratches a trace of a more complex story?

[Storyville Portrait], E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873–1949), Gelatin silver print from glass negative

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