Maya Gabeira, Brazilian champion surfer.

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Photo by Francesco Carrozzini © ESPN Magazine

Although known today for his remarkable portraits of prostitutes in the Storyville district of New Orleans early in the last century, work he did for his own pleasure, E. J. Bellocq was a professional photographer as well. Not much of his official work remains, and what does doesn’t seem extraordinary, though it’s certainly evocative.

This is a boat docked at the New Basin Canal in 1908, preparing to take folks on an excursion around Lake Pontchartrain.

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Prostitutes playing cards in a Storyville bordello.

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Ah, that Raleigh Rye . . .

Note the tiny furniture on the lower shelf of the table.

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Beautiful, haunted . . .

A prostitute in Storyville, New Orleans, playing with her dog.

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At first glance, this woman, a prostitute in the Storyville district of New Orleans around 1912, seems to have a look of insouciant amusement, of ironic detachment, on her face.  Study it a bit longer and you see the sadness, the despair, in her demeanor.  The insouciant attitude was probably a professional mask — good enough for a drunken client in a room lit by gaslight or lamplight — but starting to crumble a bit in the light of day.

I think it’s one of the most remarkable portraits in the history of photography.

This woman might have been walking along a street in New Orleans one day near where she worked and have seen an eleven year-old Louis Armstrong selling papers on a street corner.

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Mississippi River, St. Louis, stereograph, unknown photographer.

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Omaha Beach, first wave, photograph by Robert Capa.

Augustus St. Gaudens’s great statue of Sherman, Fifth Avenue, New York — one of the things about the city I miss the most.

[Photo © 2012 Huger Foote]

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