Remora

The great images of prostitution in the 19th century - the century of Nana -- feed by unconscious and subterranian streams into the Storyville photographs of EJ Bellocq. Walter Benjamin would have recognized the spirit of the Passagen in the itchy copulations implicit in the professional smiles of girls reclining in desolate, straw cushioned cribs, or the sentimental decorations which cluttered the rooms of the higher class tarts, and the lost allusions to a debased and by this time comic myth of Oriental sensuality that runs right into the chinese motifs decorating the ceramic chamber pots under the often used beds in the quality houses as well as the porcelein bric a brac behind glass and lock and key in the overstuffed steamboat mansions along St. Charles from which the better, regular clients came. Ornament is crime, the Viennese Modernists said. Ornament is where the dream of Lustmord, sex killing, begins. Limited Inc saw Bellocq's work in Al Rose's book on Storyville. I was living in New Orleans then myself, and vaguely knew that Pretty Baby, the Louis Malle film, was based on this book. But when I looked at those prints, I knew I was seeing something mad -- something that Manet's Olympia hinted at. It was the madness of a man who can't get over what is between a woman's legs. He can't get over the sight, smell, touch of the thing, he can't get over how the vagina is the body becoming the body. Bellocq, of course, might never have read Nana, certainly didn't know Rimbaud, but this is what gives his work its power: he had to make it all up. The most startling photos were, of course, the ones with the heads of the women erased. The erasures are concentrated, jagged scribbles; they look as though they were done in some fury, figurative damage to a figure, the transfer of rancorous passion that still looks criminal. The story was that Bellocq's brother, a priest, must have worked over these photographs. Even then I wondered why a priest would be destroying the faces instead of the bodies -- what was the point? Now Lee Friedlander, who restored Bellocq's photos, is saying that he believes Bellocq himself did it. One of the Roses has a great article on the subject at Exquisite Corpse.



Here's a graf:

Recently, Lee Friedlander has re-examined the plates and tried to duplicate the scratching with a sample area, but the emulsion flaked off instead of scratching. The emulsion around the original defacement in some areas is folded over gently, and could only have done so when wet. Therefore, E.J. Bellocq probably defaced the negatives shortly after he developed them in the early 1900s.
In one photograph, however, a woman wears a carnival mask that has been incongruously positioned to hide her eyes, possibly echoing some ambivalence that made Bellocq scratch the faces from so many of the negatives. Yet the approach to the women's faces is not the only curious aspect of Bellocq's Storyville work. In one pair of photographs, a woman stands clothed in the first image in front of heavy wooden doors, but in the second image, she is nude, her face has been scratched from the negative, and a heavy couch has been pushed in front of the door. A locket, another repeating motif in Bellocq's Storyville work, also becomes visible in the second image. One of Bellocq's defaced nudes is actually shown examining her locket. But the pair of images mentioned above is not the only example of couches in front of doors in Bellocq's Storyville nudes. One such image shows clearly that there is already a lock on the door, and a cord from an electric light has further been wrapped around the lock in what looks like a final obsessive attempt at privacy. Why would Bellocq feel the need to use a couch, a lock, and a wire to keep the door shut in an expensive brothel? Rugs used as hasty partial backdrops and, in one case, sawhorses also suggest that Bellocq may have intended to drop the backgrounds from his images, vignette, or otherwise alter the images to imitate the saccharine romantic photographs and paintings he hung on his walls. In fact, one of Bellocq's portraits is clearly shown vignetted and framed in one of the two studies of his desk.