Bellocq / Photographs from Storyville, The Red-Light District of New Orleans

Description

Bellocq:: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans
John Szarko

John Szarkowski (Text); E. J. Bellocq (Photographer); Lee Friedlander; Susan Sontag (Introduction)
Titel:
Bellocq:: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans
ISBN: 0679449752 (ISBN-13: 9780679449751)
Zustand: wie neu
Verlag: Random House
Format: 1,3 x 30,5 x 31,1 cm
Seiten: 83
Gewicht: 1260 g
Ort: New York
Einband: Leinen
Sprache: Englisch
Beschreibung: Schlagwörter: Frauen; Erotik; Erotic; Vintage; Bildband s/w Fotografie; photography
Zustand: Buch und original Schutzumschlag einwandfrei.

Bildband durchgängig mit großformatigen schwarz/weiß Fotos aus dem Prostituierten-Millieu aus den Anfangstagen der Fotografie (ca. Ende 19. / Anfang 20. Jahrhundert).

Klappentext:
“E. J. Bellocq’s photographs of Storyville prostitutes became famous in 1970, when they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bellocq was more or less unknown before that, but with the show and the accompanying book, his mysterious, hauntingly beautiful portraits reached a wide audience, and Bellocq became a celebrated figure in the history of photography.
The Storyville portraits, which were made around 1912, constitute the only work of Bellocq’s that is known to have survived. Eighty-nine glass plates were found some years after his death, and were eventually bought by the American photographer Lee Friedlander, who printed them for the show and book sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. The book has long been out of print, and for this new edition Friedlander has expanded the number of images from thirty-four to fifty-two, and they have been reproduced in a larger format, the size of the glass plates themselves. The text from the original edition by John Szarkowski, the former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, is reprinted here. It is based on interviews Friedlander conducted with people who knew Bellocq—a fellow photographer, several musicians, a writer, and a former prostitute who was one of Bellocq’s subjects.
Bellocq was a commercial photographer—of boats, mostly —and probably did this work for himself. His subjects seem to be collaborators in a mutually satisfying process. “Clearly, no one was being spied on,” Susan Sontag comments in her Introduction to this edition. She notes the “beauty and forth-right presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic ease, and the tangibleness of their vanished world.” One of this country’s few closed and legalized red-light districts, Storyville got its name when, in 1896, Alderman Sidney Story attempted to clear up the New Orleans waterfront by restrict-ing prostitution to a circumscribed area. Much to his chagrin, the area came to be called “Storyville,” and it was so known until the U.S. Navy closed it for good in 1917. Storyville also became famous äs the home of New Orleans jazz.
Bellocq is remembered äs an odd, misshapen man— reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec—whose craft seems to have absorbed most of his energy and interest. His pictures teil us perhaps more about him than can those who knew him only äs a Strange figure with a camera who kept very much to himself. They reveal an artist of considerable skill and uncul-tivated but compelling sensibility. “In his own way, in these pictures, Bellocq consummates many love affairs,” writes John Szarkowski. “Bellocq’s prostitutes are beautiful… Beautiful innocently or tenderly or wickedly or joyfully or obscenely, but all beautiful, in the same sense that they are present, unique, irreplaceable, believable, receptive. Each of these pictures is the product of a successful alliance.”

K0517j
Erschienen: 1996