Tales from Storyville 3: The Poet and the Prostitute (Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey)

Photo of Natasha Trethewey by Nancy Crampton 

and photo of a Storyville prostitute by E. J. Bellocq

I.

According to Susan Sontag, only men find something romantic about prostitution; women look at things - including photographs of naked women taken in Storyville - differently don'tcha know. Nevertheless, there's something distinctly romantic about Natasha Trethewey's second collection of verse, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). 

The work, divided into three main sections, consists of a series of poems in the form of an epistolary novella meditating on an imaginary and composite figure (Ophelia) supposedly captured by Bellocq's camera. It occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading, detailing as it does the life of a mixed-race prostitute in the early 1900s who had nothing to fall back on (as Toni Morrison would say).

But what's really interesting, philosophically, is that whilst Bellocq directs his gaze towards female flesh, Trethewey attempts to offer us a glimpse into Ophelia's soul; transforming her from an anonymous sex object into a unique subject whom we might know, value, and grow to love.

Most people would probably find nothing wrong with that; would think it a beautiful thing to do. But Foucault calls this process subjectivation and regards it as the exercise of power favoured by liberal humanism; i.e., the way in which the (amoral and irrational) forces and desires of the body are codified, coordinated, and given personal expression.

(I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth thinking about ...) 

II.

If asked to choose, I suppose my favourite part of the work is found in section two and entitled 'Letters from Storyville'; the part in which Ophelia recounts her initial experiences as a prostitute, including her name change to Violet, something which fans of the film Pretty Baby (1978) will knowingly smile at.

That said, I'm also very fond of this sonnet from section three of the book, with which I'd like to close this post:

'Storyville Diary,' Photography 1911

I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,

one arm folded behind my back, the other

limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,

my back so straight I imagine the bones

separating in my spine, my neck lengthening

like evening shadow. When I see this plate

I try to recall what I was thinking -

how not to be exposed, though naked, how

to wear skin like a garment, seamless.

Bellocq thinks I'm right for the camera, keeps

coming to my room. These plates are fragile,

he says, showing me how easy it is

to shatter this image of myself, how

a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.

See: Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, (Graywolf Press, 2002). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part two of this post - on Bellocq's photographs - should click here.

Tales from Storyville 2: The Photos of E. J. Bellocq (With Notes from Susan Sontag)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

Storyville may have been closed down in 1917 - and knocked down in the 1930s to make way for public housing - but thanks to the photographs of Ernest Joseph Bellocq (1873-1949), images of the period continue to haunt the pornographic imagination and inspire artists and onanists everywhere. 

Born into a wealthy family of French créole origins, Bellocq established himself as a professional photographer who specialised in pictures of landmarks, ships, and machinery. However, unbeknown to but a small circle of acquaintances, he also enjoyed taking photos of the seamier side of life in New Orleans, as found in the opium dens of Chinatown, for example, and the brothels of Storyville.

After his death, most of Bellocq's pictures were lost or destroyed (including the Chinatown series). However, by a stroke of good fortune, the Storyville negatives were later discovered and eventually purchased by a young photographer and artist, Lee Friedlander, who, in 1970, mounted a show at the Museum of Modern Art (curated by John Szarkowski) featuring prints from Bellocq's original 8" x 10" glass negatives.

All of the images were of women: some nude, some dressed; some looking bored, some smiling and playfully posing. In my favourite picture, "an exceptionally pretty woman with a dazzling smile reclines on a chaise-longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style mask she is wearing only black stockings" (Susan Sontag).

A book, Storyville Portraits (1970), with a preface by Friedlander, was published to coincide with the exhibition and, overnight, Bellocq's posthumous fame was assured [1]. The images were said to have a unique poignancy and beauty, as well as great cultural-historical importance (serving, for example, not only as a record of what the prostitutes of Storyville actually looked like, but also providing clues as to how the interiors of the brothels were decorated). 

And I suppose that's true; though there's also an undercurrent of violence present in some of them - which might be said to manifest itself in the fact that several of the negatives were deliberately damaged, with the faces of the women scrubbed out. Probably this was done by Bellocq himself, though no one knows for certain who did this or why. [2]
     
The fact that we have so little biographical information about Bellocq has encouraged several writers to create fictional accounts of his life, filling in the gaps with made-up details and fantasies of their own. A cinematic version of Bellocq was famously played by Keith Carradine in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), a film I have recently discussed: click here.

The Storyville pictures have also inspired a good deal of imaginative literature about the women in them and in part three of this post we shall examine Natasha Trethewey's collection of poems Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) ... 

Notes

[1] A more extensive collection of Friedlander's prints was published with an introduction by Susan Sontag in 1996. Sontag argues that, above all else, the pictures are unforgettable once seen and notes how there is much about them that affirms current taste: "the low-life material; the near mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as objets trouvés, and a gift from the past." See Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, ed. John Szarkowski, (Random House, 1996). 

[2] Sontag seems to deny this violence, although she also is disturbed by the attempt to (literally) deface some of the amorous objects. In an interesting passage (marred only by the sexism of her final sentence), she writes: 

"Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn't have dictated to them how they should pose - whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were. How far we are, in Bellocq's company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious - or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute's life - are those [...] on which the faces have been scratched out. [...] These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution." (Ibid.) 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part three of this post - on Natasha Trethewey's poetic musings on Bellocq's pictures - should click here.