Content area
Full Text
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed .... There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
-Susan Sontag, On Photography (4)
This epigraph invites us to question the benign aspect of photographs / photography in general and in Natasha Trethewey's work specifically. Essayist Susan Sontag's comment is especially relevant because she wrote the introduction to John Szarkowski's Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red Light District of New Orleans (1996). Sontag says that the Bellocq images are "touching, good natured, and respectful" (Szarkowski 3). Trethewey's imagined "Ophelia," one of Bellocq's models, presents both the photographs and the photographer in a much more personal and nuanced light.
This essay examines poems that the current US poet laureate published in Domestic Work, Bellocq s Ophelia, and Thrall. The thread linking some of the most compelling and haunting poems of these three exquisite volumes is Trethewey's use of a broad spectrum of visual culture. Trethewey has established herself as a poet whose relationship to photographs and photography is a driving force behind and within her poetry. The photographer, the photographs, and cameras all figure prominently in her work; by emphasizing both the literary and historical components of photography in her poetry, a deeper, wiser, more intellectual aspect of Trethewey's work emerges.
The persona Ophelia is fictional, but her story is rooted in the history of prostitution in New Orleans. In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq, a commercial photographer, took portraits of prostitutes in New Orleans's Storyville district. Trethewey uses Bellocq's portraits as the pictorial landscape into which she imagines the life of a young prostitute and places her in an octoroon brothel. Trethewey may be using Bellocq's Ophelia to "flip the script" on poet Marianne Moore's well known quote about the best poetry evoking "imaginary gardens with real toads" (Moore 135) by presenting the reader with a real garden (Bellocq's Storyville) with an imaginary toad (Ophelia.) But it is the "toad" that holds us spellbound by transforming the garden.
Ophelia is biracial, the daughter of a black mother and white father. She is from a hard working family, where education is highly valued; and it is her genteel manners and refined sensibilities that attract the photographer's attention. She becomes one of Bellocq's models; in time,...