Ernest James Bellocq

Career After his education, his father secured him a position at his firm. He subsequently moved between jobs as a bookkeeper and clerk at various businesses in and around the French Quarter. By 1898, the year Storyville (New Orleans' legally sanctioned prostitution district) opened, Bellocq had become recognized as one of the city's up-and-coming amateur photographers. A local publication that year identified him as a descendant of one of the city's most prominent Creole families. In 1970, a show of Friedlander's posthumous prints on gold tone printing out paper from Bellocq's 8" x 10" glass negatives were mounted by curator John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. A more extensive collection of Friedlander's prints, entitled Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, was published with an introduction by Susan Sontag in 1996.

The E. J. Bellocq Gallery of Photography at Louisiana Tech University is named in his honor.

The Storyville photographs All the photographs are portraits of women. Some are nude, some dressed, others posed as if acting a mysterious narrative. Many of the negatives were badly damaged, in part deliberately, which encouraged speculation. Bellocq is the most likely candidate, He also appears in Michael Ondaatje's novel Coming Through Slaughter and is a protagonist in Peter Everett's novel Bellocq's Women. These works take many liberties with the facts of Bellocq's life.

The photographs have inspired imaginative literature about the women in them. There are several collections of poems, notably Brooke Bergan's Storyville: A Hidden Mirror and Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia.

In 1971, Storyville Portraits won a mention at the Rencontres d'Arles's Book Award, France.

The 1983 novel Fat Tuesday by R. Wright Campbell features a thinly veiled depiction of Bellocq, a photographer named B.E. Locque.

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