This triptych is an homage to the photographer Ernest Joseph Bellocq, whose haunting portraits documented the women of Storyville, New Orleans’ fabled red-light district, in the early 20th century. In these images, Bellocq captured not only the physical presence of his subjects but also the layered complexity of their lives—at once intimate, vulnerable, and defiant. Some of the photographs bear an unsettling alteration: the faces of certain women have been deliberately scratched out. The reasons remain shrouded in mystery, leaving us to speculate whether these erasures were acts of shame, protection, censorship, or even self-assertion. This absence becomes as evocative as the visible, compelling us to imagine the lives behind the void and to confront the fragility of memory, reputation, and the narratives we preserve from history. In reinterpreting these works, the triptych seeks to honor both what was seen and what was obscured, inviting viewers to linger in the tension between revelation and concealment.

Size: 60”X45”
Medium: Oil and tinted house paint on repurposed canvas drop cloth, copper pipe, tassels.