Product Description
“In 1897, 16 square blocks just off the French Quarter were designated to be a place where vice would be legal – it was called Storyville. Bellocq managed to capture many of Storyville’s sex workers in their own dwellings not just as sexualized pinups for postcards. Bellocq gained the trust of his subjects, who seem completely at ease before his camera. In 1949, at the age of 76, he fell down some stairs in the French Quarter and hit his head; he died a week later in Charity Hospital. His brother Leo discovered the negatives of the portraits. They ended up stored in a junk shop—a run-down bathroom in an old slave quarters. In 1958, the glass negatives were discovered in a chest, and nine years later, Lee Friedlander acquired the collection. The book, from 1970, begins with a great conversation between Friedlander, a few other photographers from New Orleans, a jazz musician and even one of Bellocq’s subjects.”
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