Love for money, portrait for art: snapshots of women of easy virtue 1912

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1912, one of the famous American photographers went straight to Red light district New Orleans. His goal was to visit the beautiful ladies of easy virtue, but not for your own pleasure - work, only work! At that time, these pictures were considered so provocative that the photographer not only never published them, he did not print them at all, and kept the negatives behind seven locks.

John Ernest Joseph Belloc (John Ernest Joseph Bellocq) was a professional photographer based in New Orleans. Landscapes, factories, cars, ships - that was what made up John's order list. However, the irony of life is that real fame came to him after his death thanks to Belloc's secret hobby. Most of the photographer's photographs were burned, but the secret archive remained intact, as it was found only 20 years after Belloc's death.

Photos from the Storyville area, which was known in New Orleans as the area of prostitutes, mafia and illegal business, later entered the book. Storyville Portraits, which became possible thanks to the young photographer Lee Friedlander (Lee friedlander), which, in fact, discovered all these photographs. In some pictures, women appeared completely naked, in others - in clothes, some women were wearing masks or deliberately hiding their faces. Although most of the ladies still willingly posed for the camera.

Some of the footage was deliberately spoiled. Perhaps it was Belloc himself who did it, perhaps his brother-priest, or maybe someone else, but experts are still more inclined to believe that this was the work of the photographer himself, since most of the damage was done when the pictures were still wet, i.e. immediately after development. Here we are talking about printed photographs, which were hidden even more reliably than negatives and were discovered later. In the spoiled photographs, most of the girls appear completely naked.

A little later, on the other side of the Atlantic, photographer Jacques Biederer decided to create his own archive of provocative and prohibited photos: he created a whole organization for the production of erotic products, which had considerable success.