Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava on Masters of Photography

Roy DeCarava Photos of Harlem from Listicles, the "L" magazine

Remembering Roy DeCarava's 60 Years Of Photos:  NPR story from "Fresh Air" broadcast on WHYY

Roy DeCarava's Obituary from the London Times (November 6, 2009):

In the mid-1950s street photography was generally a documentarian’s medium, useful in the service of social change. Yet Roy DeCarava was as preoccupied with light and shade as with his insider’s view of a down-at-heel, largely African-American New York neighbourhood.

He was mentored early in his career by Edward Steichen, but went on to forge a unique identity as a master of formal composition. Trained as a painter and printmaker, DeCarava was influenced by Rembrandt and Michelangelo. He used velvety greys and stark contrasts of light and shade to endow his images with sculptural dimension and drama. Shooting in ambient light, he printed in such a way as to coax light and dark from his picture, so that a child walking down a Harlem street might be bathed in celestial light and surrounded by menacing shadows.

Troubled by the absence of beautiful, complex images of African Americans, DeCarava had stepped in. During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s he revealed hidden corners of Harlem — subway stations, restaurants, apartment interiors — to viewers who would not otherwise have had exposure to that world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did so not as a consciousness-raising exercise. His photographs were intended to stand on their own, outside a sociological or missionary context, as works of art.
Seeking and winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 1952, at Steichen’s encouragement, DeCarava wrote in his application that his goal was to provide “penetrating insight” into black culture. But he also aimed to depict his black subjects in a “serious and artistic way”.

His 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, done in collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes, was a bestseller, and DeCarava’s work was widely exhibited and acclaimed. But he did not always make commercial approval his priority. Though many of his portraits were of African Americans, he resisted being identified and marketed as a “black artist”, and he doggedly guarded control over the presentation of his work, once withdrawing from an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 1969 Met show, “Harlem on My Mind”, had failed to include the views of black civic leaders in its planning stages. DeCarava, invited to contribute his work, instead joined the picket line.

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was born in Harlem in 1919, the only child of a Jamaican single mother, Elfreda Ferguson. He attended vocational school, all the while doing odd jobs — shining shoes, delivering ice — to help meet expenses. A teacher from his New York public school once came to the house and urged his mother to foster his artistic talent.

His mother, herself an amateur photographer, provided art supplies and music lessons, and DeCarava gained admission to the Cooper Union, the prestigious institute in Manhattan, to study art and architecture. After two years there, discouraged by what he described as a hostile reception by the overwhelmingly white student body, he attended the Harlem Community Art Centre. While studying painting there, he also made signs for the Works Progress Administration, a project of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

DeCarava briefly served in the Army during the Second World War as a topographical draughtsman, then worked in New York as a painter and commercial illustrator. Initially using photographs as references for drawings, he was drawn to the immediacy of the photographic medium. Despite the painterly appearance of his work — with forms seeming to emerge from darkness by happenstance — his methods were precise and premeditated, reliant on darkroom techniques that changed the balance of light and shade after the fact.

In 1955 he opened an exhibition gallery in his apartment, showing the work of Berenice Abbott and other masters along with his own. Despite critical praise, sales were poor, and he closed the space after two years. A decade later he founded the Kamoinge Workshop (the name is a variation of the term “group effort” from the Bantu language of Kenya), giving young black photographers a place to show their work. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s DeCarava recorded scenes that grabbed his attention. In one image, Force, Downstate, (1963) a woman is grasped by the ankles and dragged off by police.

Starting in the late 1950s, DeCarava was employed as a photojournalist for Look and Newsweek magazines and, in the 1960s and 1970s, for Sports Illustrated. In the magazine world he encountered enough racism that, for three years in the mid-1960s, he was prompted to chair the American Society of Magazine Photographers’ Committee to End Discrimination Against Black Photographers. Magazine art directors, he said in a television interview in 1996, “were not used to seeing black artists walk through the door with a portfolio of photographs”, and some were “literally shaking” when they saw his work. DeCarava was engaged in a longstanding dispute with Gordon Parks, another pre-eminent black photographer, who did not agree with him about discrimination in their milieu.

Feeling constrained by the institutional structures and deadlines of journalism, DeCarava eventually gave up editorial work to teach at Cooper Union in the late 1960s and, beginning in 1975, at Hunter College. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Throughout his career he returned to his native Harlem for material and inspiration. Prominent African Americans — Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis — were subjects of his portraits. Yet some of his most famous images were of anonymous, wistful figures — like a young girl in a white graduation dress, shrouded in bright light, juxtaposed with a garbage-strewn urban lot. She lifts her hem delicately, in an apparent rebuke to the impurity around her.

According to Peter Galassi, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, DeCarava was “looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle”. In a 2006 interview the photographer described the essence of his art as “taking what is and making it yours”.
His wife, Sherry Turner, an art historian, survives him, together with four children.

Roy DeCarava, photographer, was born on December 9, 1919. He died on October 27, 2009, aged 89

Gordon Parks

"Those people who want to use a camera should have something in mind, there's something they want to show, something they want to say...," Parks explains. "I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.  Icould have just as easily picked up a knife of a gun, like many of my childhood friends did... most of whom were murdered or put in prison... but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so."

 

Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity

Gordon Parks Farm Security Administration Photographs

Gordon Parks:  PDN & Kodak Professional Legends on Line

Gordon Parks at the Farm Security Administration:

Gordon Parks was born in Kansas in 1912 and spent his youth in Minnesota. During the Depression a variety of jobs, including stints as a musician and as a waiter on passenger trains, took him to various parts of the northern United States. He took up photography during his travels and by 1940 had made his first serious attempts to earn a living from the art as a self-taught fashion photographer in Minneapolis and Chicago. Though he had experienced racial discrimination outside the South, it was in the southern city of Washington, D.C., that Parks "found out what prejudice was really like." In 1942, an opportunity to work for the Farm Security Administration brought the photographer to the nation's capital; Parks later recalled that "discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen."1

Parks came to Washington on a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a foundation dedicated to research about the South, which had a special program to encourage work of all kinds by promising blacks. As a Rosenwald fellow, Parks joined the august company of Ralph Bunche, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and many others.3
Parks, who had admired the Farm Security Administration photographs for some time, planned to spend his fellowship year as an apprentice photographer in Stryker's section and had received encouragement from the FSA Jack Delano when he was applying for the fellowship.4 But when he arrived in Washington, he recalled in 1983, Stryker resisted, expressing worries about the reaction of others--in the agency as well as in the city--to a black photographer. "When I went there," Parks said, "Roy didn't want to take me into the FSA, but the Rosenwald people were a part of that whole Rooseveltian thing. They insisted: 'Roy, you've got to do it.'" As Parks remembered it, Will Alexander--the vice-president of the Rosenwald Fund and the former head of the Farm Security Administration and thus Stryker's old boss--delivered the final nudge.5

Parks's autobiography and interviews emphasize the importance of the education Stryker gave him.6 After asking Parks to leave his cameras in the office, Stryker sent the newly arrived photographer around Washington, instructing him to visit stores, restaurants, and theaters. When Parks was refused service, he became furious and returned to the office ready to "show the rest of the world what your great city of Washington, D.C. is really like," proposing to photograph scenes of injustice and portraits of bigots. In response, Stryker sent Parks to the file to study the work of Lange, Shahn, Evans, Delano, Rothstein, and others. Parks studied their photographs of gutted fields, dispossessed migrants, and the gaunt faces of people caught in the Depression. Although some might lay these tragedies to God, Parks wrote, "the research accompanying these stark photographs accused man himself--especially the lords of the land." As the effectiveness of photographing victims instead of perpetrators and the importance of the words that accompany photographs sank in, Parks concluded, "I began to get the point."7

One evening a few weeks later when he was alone in the office with Stryker, Parks said he was still seeking a way to expose intolerance with a camera. Stryker pointed out a charwoman at work in the building. "Go have a talk with her," he said, "See what she has to say about life and things." Parks complied, and later recalled his first conversation with Ella Watson:

She began to spill out her life's story. It was a pitiful one. She had struggled alone after her mother had died and her father had been killed by a lynch mob. She had gone through high school, married and become pregnant. Her husband was accidentally shot to death two days before their daughter was born. By the time the daughter was eighteen, she had given birth to two illegitimate children, dying two weeks after the second child's birth. What's more, the first child had been striken with paralysis a year before its mother died.8

Parks made his first photographs of Watson in an office with a large American flag on the wall, two of which are included here. Both pictures are carefully posed, and the multiple shadows cast by the office furniture indicate that Parks used an elaborate three-flash setup. The close-up version is one of his most famous photographs, serving as the frontispiece in Parks's word-and-picture poem Moments without Proper Names, a book dedicated to Roy Stryker and containing a memorial poem for Farm Security Administration photographer John Vachon.10 "

In 1983, when Parks reflected on the lessons he had learned from photographing this series, his thoughts returned to the matter of intolerance. He told an interviewer that he could not simply photograph the person who had discriminated against him, "and say, 'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it."13 In the same interview, he underscored the reasoning behind the title of his 1965 autobiography, A Choice of Weapons: "I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil."14 Parks's weapon is the camera.

Eugene Atget

Atget Collection at The George Eastman House

Atget Exhibition at The International Center of Photography

Atget Collection at The J. Paul Getty Museum

Atget Collection on Masters of Photography

Atget Biography from Atget.com:

French, 1857-1927:  The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man.  He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth; from the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success; at forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work.

Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.

Atget's work is unique on two levels. He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century. He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself. Other photographers had been concerned with describing specific facts (documentation), or with exploiting their indivisual sensibilities (self-expression). Atget enconpassed and transcended both approaches when he set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition.

The pictures that he made in the service of this concept are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.

 

Atget Biography from Photo-Seminars.com:

Eugene Atget photographed Paris for thirty years. With a singleness of purpose rarely excelled, he made his incredible monument to a city. When he died in 1927 he left approximately 2000 eight by ten inches glass plates and almost 10,000 prints, not counting the plates deposited in the Palais Royale archives. Here is one of the most extraordinary achievements of photography. Yet we know almost nothing of Atget as a person and less of Atget as a photographer. His history is to be read in his work.

Eugene Atget Life:  Atget was born in Bordeaux in 1856. An orphan, he was brought up by an uncle. At an early age he shipped to sea as cabin boy. Doubtless his early experiences made a deep impression and enriched his vision of the world, for in later years he vividly recited to friends amusing anecdotes of this period. Early in his life his faculties of observation were sharpened and developed.

As a young man, he turned to the stage, first in the French provincial cities then in the suburbs of Paris. His physique fitted him only for the less attractive roles usually the villain’s part. As maturity approached, acting became an unrewarding occupation. To what should he turn? He had a lively liking for painting and associated a great deal with painters. He considered being one of them and indeed tried his hand at painting, a number of examples of his own brushwork were found at his studio upon his death.

Finally he decided to be a photographer, an art photographer. He already had an ambition to create a collection of all that was artistic and picturesque in Paris and its surroundings. An immense subject. Atget obtained equipment and with a sack full of plates on his back "started off." Thus began a vast esthetic documentation, a labor of love for thirty years.

It is necessary to qualify the meaning of "art photographer" as well as "esthetic" documentation, since these terms mean different things to different people. Never was Atget "arty." His art stems from his grasping of the photographic medium without confusion or imitation of painting. His vision, backed by heart and brain, mature sensitivity and above all selectivity was well synthesized and projected for the beholder to understand and thereby to be enriched. Maturity, in this case, was not a handicap but a powerful ingredient.

Armed with the experience of travel, observation, and drama, Atget photographed the monuments of Paris, houses, sites, chateaux, streets, subjects about to disappear. Photography was no more materially rewarding than acting. Nevertheless he persevered, lugging his unwieldy view camera and heavy glass plates. One day Luc-Olivier-Merson bought a print for fifteen francs. Atget rejoiced and was encouraged. The playwright Victorien Sardou became interested in his work and put him on the track of vanishing Paris. Before the World War of 1914-1918, Atget was gradually winning recognition and financial support.

But the war broke out "the second that Atget had seen. He had a horror of it, he loved his work so much." People thought he was a spy or lunatic. He no longer sold anything when there was peace again, he was an old man. He produced less and less, lived, as it were, on his capital of old work. The archives of the Palais Royale acquired some of his plates, but at low prices and purely for their record value. So Atget’s life moved to its close: In 1927 he died, without public recognition or understanding of the vast importance of his work.

Atget’s Photography:  Atget assigned himself an alluring and provoking subject, the city of Paris, the dream city of thousands of struggling, aspiring, gifted and would-be poets, painters, composers. Paris, the city of art and bridges over the Seine, of boulevards and cafes, of narrow, crooked streets and gray plane trees in the beautiful Luxembourg gardens.

To Atget, Paris was not a dream but an actuality a fact of hard material expressions, of strange contrasts and contradictions. It was weathered, eroded facades of mansion and humble dwelling; ornate construction of wrought iron grilles and balconies; fantasy of shop signs and carousels; visible magic of rich grapes, cherries, cauliflower’s, lobsters, heaped in luxuriance in Les Halles; formal elegance of Versailles and the Trianon; rustic primitiveness of a plow lying in furrows outside the fortifications; outmoded forms of carriage and horse-drawn cabriolet; excitement of an eclipse seen by crowds in the Place de l’Opera; a thousand and yet another thousand images of the miracle of daily reality.

In recreating Paris for us and for all time, Atget gave it permanent reality by utilizing photography in its own right. He did not veer toward excessive concern with technique nor toward the imitation of painting but steered a straight course, making the medium speak for itself in a superb rendering of materials, textures, surfaces, details. Within the limits of his equipment, he recorded all phases of the life about him: people, street activity, the city proper.

 

Atget’s Equipment:  The photographs reveal Atget’s method of work. His equipment consisted of a simple 18 X 24 cm view camera, with almost none of the present-day adjustments. It had a rising front, as may be seen by the photographs, many of whose corners have been cut off because the lens did not give full coverage. He had no wide-angle lens. The focal length of his lens is unknown, but it must have been between eleven and twelve inches. Atget used glass plates. As for accessories, he certainly did not use an exposure meter. At most he made use of a simple coefficient table with mathematical calculations. But it is more likely that he judged exposure by his vast experience with light conditions, subject matter, and type of plate emulsion. Because the emulsion used then were non-color-sensitive, he never used filters. For interior work, he used no artificial light of any sort but availed himself always of natural light. Any shutter used with the lens was at most a simple bulb shutter. Atget made a practice of closing down to a small aperture if conditions permitted. Only when he photographed people did he open up the diaphragm and focus critically on the center of interest, leaving the background out of focus. It is doubtful if his lens could have been faster than 1/11 at its widest opening. It would seem from the photographs themselves that most of them were taken during the summer months when the sun’s actinic rays are stronger. Also most of the human figures of these series are posed to the extent that Atget probably asked them "to hold still a moment."

Because he did not have the advantage of fast lenses and fast emulsions, Atget had to solve his photographic problems within the capacities of his materials. Since his equipment and materials were not adequate to stop fast action, he worked a great deal in the early hours of the day, rising at dawn.

Atget’s photographs are the supreme proof that photography is more than a "machine." Except for the complex factors of stopping motion, Atget found no obstacle to making his photographs an extremely expressive comment on life. Not the camera, but Atget himself dictated what would be set down in these beautiful prints. The intensity of his purpose and vision was the powerful drive which compelled him to undergo long years of neglect and hard work. At the same time he accepted the tremendous labor of his method, carrying the cumbersome view camera many miles, weighed down by bulky glass plates. For him the camera was but an instrument for expressing his intense awareness of life.

In personal matters Atget was, if not an eccentric was uncompromising. From the age of 50, he lived solely on milk, bread, and pieces of sugar. He was absolute in hygiene and in art. This determination when applied to photography created a unique monument.

Amy Stein

Amy Stein Photography

Amy Stein Biograrphy from her web site:

Amy Stein (b. 1970) is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the West Collection.

In 2006, Amy was a winner of the Saatchi Gallery/Guardian Prize for her Domesticated series. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. Amy's first book, Domesticated, was released in fall 2008. It won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival.

Amy was raised in Washington, DC, and Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BS in Political Science from James Madison University and a MS in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 2006, Amy received her MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Stein teaches photography at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Amy is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, ClampArt in New York, and Pool Gallery in Berlin.

E.J. Bellocq

E.J. Bellocq collection on Masters of Photography 

Susan Sontag's introduction to "Bellocq:  Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans:

FIRST 0F ALL, the pictures are unforgettable - photography's ultimate standard of value. And it's not hard to see why the trove of glass negatives by a hitherto unknown photographer working in New Orleans in the early years of this century became one of the most admired recoveries in photography's widening, ever incomplete history. Eighty-nine glass plates in varying states of corrosion, shatter, and defacement was the treasure that Lee Friedlander came across in New Orleans in the late 1950s and eventually purchased. When, in 1970, a selection of the ingeniously developed, superb prints Friedlander had made was published by the Museum of Modern Art, the book became, deservedly, an instant classic. So much about these pictures affirms current taste: the low-life material; the near mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as objets trouves, and a gift from the past. Add to this what is decidedly unfashionable about the pictures: the plausibility and friendliness of their version of the photographer's troubling, highly conventional subject. And because the subject is so conventional, the photographer's relaxed way of looking seems that much more distinctive. If there had once been more than eighty-nine glass negatives and one day a few others turned up anywhere in the world, no one would fall to recognize a Bellocq.
 
The year is 1912, but we would not be surprised to be told that the pictures were taken in 1901, when Theodore Dreiser began writing Jennie Gerhardt, or in 1899, when Kate Chopin published The Awakening, or in 1889, the year Dreiser set the start of his first novel, Sister Carrie - the ballooning clothes and plump bodies could be dated anywhere from 1880 to the beginning of World War I. The charges of indecency that greeted Chopin's only novel and Dreiser's first were so unrelenting that Chopin retreated from literature and Dreiser faltered. (Anticipating more such attacks, Dreiser, after beginning his great second novel in 1901, put it aside for a decade.) Bellocq's photographs belong to this same world of anti-formulaic, anti-salacious sympathy for "fallen" women, though in his case we can only speculate about the origin of that sympathy. For we know nothing about the author of these pictures except what some old cronies of Bellocq told Friedlander: that he had no other interests except photography; that "he always behaved polite" (this from one of his Storyville sitters); that he spoke with a "terrific" French accent; and that he was - shades of Toulouse-Lautrec - hydrocephalic and dwarf-like. Lest the association induce us to imagine Bellocq as a belle époque erotomane who had transplanted himself to the humid franco-creole American city to continue his voyeuristic haunting of bordellos, it might be mentioned that Bellocq also frequented the opium dens of New Orleans's Chinatown with his camera. The Chinatown series, alas, has never been recovered.
 
The Storyville series (in this new enlarged edition) includes two pictures of parlor decor. The interest for Bellocq must have been that, above a fireplace in one picture and a rolltop desk in the other, the walls are covered with photographs surrounding a central painting, photographs with the same contrasts as the ones he was taking: all are of women, some dressed to the nines, some erotically naked. The rest of Bellocq's photographs are individual portraits. That is, there is a single subject per picture, except for a shot of two champagne drinkers on the floor absorbed in a card game (there is a similar off-duty moment in Bunuel's unconvincing, notional portrait of a brothel in Belle de Jour) and another of a demure girl posing in her Sunday best, long white dress and jacket and hat, beside an iron bed in which someone is sleeping. Typically - an exception is this picture, which shows only the sleeping woman's head and right arm - Bellocq photographs his subjects in full figure, though sometimes a seated figure will be cut off at the knees; in only one picture - a naked woman reclining on some embroidered pi - does one have the feeling that Bellocq has chosen to come close. Central to the effect the pictures make on us is that there are a large number of them, with the same setting and cast in a variety of poses, from the most natural to the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress/undress. That they are part of a series is what gives the photographs their integrity, their depth, their meaning. Each individual picture is informed by the meaning that attaches to the whole group.
 
Most obviously, it could not be detected from at least a third of the pictures that the women are inmates of a brothel. Some are fully clothed: in one picture a woman in a large feathered hat, long-sleeved white blouse adorned with brooch and locket, and black skirt sits in the yard in front of a low black backdrop, just beyond which frayed towels are drying on a laundry line. Others are in their underwear or something like it: one poses on a chair, her hands clasped behind her head, wearing a comical-looking body stocking. Many are photographed naked - with unpretentious candor about, mostly, unpretentious bodies. Some just stand there, as if they didn't know what to do once they had taken off their clothes for the camera. Only a few offer a voluptuous pose, like the long-tressed adolescent odalisque on a wicker divan - probably Bellocq's best known picture. Two photographs show women wearing masks. One is a come-hither picture: an exceptionally pretty woman with a dazzling smile reclines on a chaise-longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style mask she is wearing only black stockings. The other picture, the opposite of a pin-up, is of a large-bellied, entirely naked woman whose mask sits as awkwardly on her face as she is awkwardly posed on the edge of a wooden chair; the mask (it appears to be a full mask minus its lower half) seems too big for her face. The first woman seems happy to pose (as, given her charms, well she might); the second seems diminished, even foiled, by her nudity. In some pictures, in which the sitters adopt a genteely pensive look, the emotion is harder to read. But in others there is little doubt that posing is a game, and fun: the woman in the shawl and vivid striped stockings sitting beside her bottle of "Raleigh Rye," appreciatively eyeing her raised glass; the woman in ample undergarments and black stockings stretched out on her stomach over an ironing board set up in the backyard, beaming at a tiny dog. Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn't have dictated to them how they should pose - whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were.
 
How far we are, in Bellocq's company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious - or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute's life - are those (eleven in this selection) on which the faces have been scratched out. (In one, the vandal - could it have been Bellocq himself? - missed the face.) These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic case, and the tangibleness of their vanished world. How touching, good natured, and respectful these pictures are. What a splendid gift Lee Friedlander has given us.