Jelly Roll wasn't the only important artist to emerge from New Orleans.
Not even musicians. There was Ernest J. Bellocq, the photographer,
whose surreptitious project is his enduring fame, a great documentary of
the Storyville whorehouses where, according to the article, prostitution
was legal at the turn of the last century.
http://www.corpse.org/issue_10/gallery/bellocq/
The article--quite lengthy and with some potentially offensive
photographs--is in Andrei Codrescu's journal, _Exquisite Corpse_.
The terrible irony of the journal's title just struck me. As did this
question...was _EQ_ still at Tulane, and are Codrescu and the others
involved okay? The commentators I heard this morning said the full
horror of last week in New Orleans may not strike home until the bodies
begin being turned as the waters are drained back into the lake. Nobody
appears to be arguing with Mayor Nagin's estimate of 10,000 dead.
In the face of such death, art is...what? inconsequetial? secondary?
what we can keep? It's not unfair to ask how much visual and literary
work has been and will be lost. Who can know? The fact that Lee
Friedlander as long ago as 1967 was able to rescue Bellocq's Storyville
work, printed it from the 8x10 camera glass plates, and exhibit it in
1970, is one of the small miracles that float over even a tragedy. They
are valuable if only as documents of a moment that came, stood still,
and passed by. It will be a miracle if the whole city does not suffer
nullification.
Ken
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Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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