oliphillips:

Age Maps

by Bobby Neel Adams

photo-a:

On E. J. Bellocq and Storyville portraits 

Here I go Copying from the Book again: 

E. J. Bellocq (1873-1949) Was a new Orleans Commercial photographer who used photography to explore the forbidden world of prostitutes. Not much is known about his surviving plates made in the storyville red light district., except that they convey a sense of complicity between the male gaze and the female sitter. Altho the atmosphere is a mix of lassitude, resignation, and sexuality, no sexual acts or men are depicted, and some of the photographs offer no clues that the women were prostitutes. Overall, the images wrestle with penetrating the vail of langour and suppressed desire in a way not possible before photography. Even the most explicit, where the women is presented in dark surroundings as a mysterious sexual object, is countered by the fantasy of availability in the woman’s expression that hints at the pleasures to be had once the masks between the observer and the observed are lifted. Some recently published Bellocq images show scratched-out women’s faces, lending the pictures a kind of licentiousness. The aggressive cancellation of their faces by an anonymous hand hints at the vulnerable position of people who offer their bodies for sale and, by proxy, shows how the making of a photograph of any powerless other always places the photographer in the judgement seat.

I think it would be really interesting to do a series loosely based on his work. Maybe one day, its been done with male hustlers and prostitutes so why not give it a modern twist.