Images of Sex Work in Early Twentieth-century America: Gender, Sexuality and Race in the Storyville Portraits

Storyville was New Orleans’ infamous red light district from 1897 to 1917. Its inhabitants, principally sex workers, were captured on film by one of the city’s photographers, E.J. Bellocq. His work brought him little recognition however until it was rediscovered by modern photographers, most notably Lee Friedlander. Over the years, the ’Storyville portraits’ have been treated as tragic, ominous and emblematic of New Orleans’ singularity and these readings have projected gendered stereotypes onto the women they portrayed. Images of Sex Work questions the long held assumptions about Bellocq and his models and argues that sex work was an everyday aspect of life in the modern city. In examining a wide range of transatlantic cultural forms, including crime fiction, illustrations and paintings, Mollie Le Veque argues that Bellocq humanized sex work and the portraits’ elusiveness gave sex workers the dignity they were so often denied.