The glass plate is carefully lowered into the solution. Under a red light, an image starts to emerge. The clear glass gradually darkens, revealing lines and shapes in a range of greys to stark blacks. A figure appears. Her image inverted, she seems suspended and contorted in a field of black. On the left, we can see the edge of a mattress; on the right, a counter with bottles and towels. Her skin is dark grey. Her expression… Someone touches the wet emulsion with a sharp object. With jagged motions, her face is removed, scratched out. She is just a body. Her expression erased from history.
June 24 – 27.
The heat commanded our journey during our trip from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to New Orleans in late June. Too hot to roam around outdoors looking for birds and other wildlife, we ended up at a few museums.
Walter Anderson Museum of Art
The first was the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. We had never heard of Anderson before, but we love art, and there was air conditioning.
At the museum, we were given a headset with an audio player for a self-guided tour. After a few initial stops, we were directed into the adjacent community center building that the museum had been built on to. Murals painted by Anderson in 1951 covered every wall of the building. The audio tour related stories about how the community felt about his work. They didn’t like it. Or perhaps they just didn’t understand it. The work was stunning.
The audio tour directed us to several other rooms and told us about other periods of Anderson’s life. One of the most fascinating was the years he would travel by rowboat to Horn Island, one of the Gulf Shore islands. The audio related fascinating stories about his time on the island, including happening upon the U.S. Army testing biological weapons during the Second World War.
The last stop on the tour was another painted room attached to the museum. This was the one-room Shearwood Cottage that Anderson spent the last part of his life in. Apparently, no other living being besides some cats and random wildlife ever entered the small cottage until after Anderson’s death, when his wife entered the room for the first time and discovered the painted walls.
I thought about Anderson as we drove over 90 miles from Ocean Springs to New Orleans. He used to make this trip on his bicycle. Apparently, he rode his bicycle all over the world and kept logs of his trips.
New Orleans Pharmacy Museum
The first museum we visited in New Orleans was the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, located in the French Quarter. This tiny museum was packed with artifacts. I was truly amazed at the extent of the collection. But what really fascinated me wasn’t how weird or bizarre all the old stuff was, but how similar our medicine cabinets are today, packed full of jars and bottles to remedy all kinds of ills. And that even though modern medicine has come so far, some people would rather take a parasite medicine for livestock to cure a major illness.
New Orleans Storyville Museum
The last museum we went to was the New Orleans Storyville Museum. I had read about Storyville in Michael Ondaatje’s book Coming Through Slaughter. This book is a fictionalized account of the life of the jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. But had forgotten that. What I remembered about the book was its descriptions of the red-light district in New Orleans called Storyville, specifically the images of women carrying mattresses on their backs.
Unlike the Pharmacy Museum, Storyville lacked artifacts. It was more of a read-every-display-sign kind of museum. I think it would have made a better book. I enjoyed that it started with a brief history of New Orleans and its red-light districts and how Storyville (which lasted from 1897 to 1917) came to be. It touched on many of the aspects of the community, including the brothels, dance halls, gambling, some of the characters, the music, and the prostitutes. It seemed kind of glamorized, which I found disappointing. The Historic New Orleans Collection gives a more realistic view of the place:
All told, the history of Storyville encompasses a tangle of themes, including prostitution, music, money, racial identity, segregation, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, displacement, and racial and sexual exploitation.
At over $30 a ticket, I think this museum is way overpriced. But I learned some interesting things, like the piano players in the clubs and bars were called “professors.” And now I know how Professor Longhair got his moniker.
For me, the most intriguing thing at the museum was the photographs of E. J. Bellocq. Bellocq. A commercial photographer, he made at least 89 photos of prostitutes in Storyville with an 8 x 10-inch view camera on glass plates. After his death, the plates made their way to an antique store and later to an art dealer named Larry Borenstein. In 1965, the photographer Lee Friedlander purchased the negatives and made prints of them using a special technique.
The photos contain a mystery. Many of them have scratched-out faces. It is unknown who did this or why. After examining the plates, Friedlander concluded that this defacing was done while the negative was still wet. One of the many enigmas of the lives of the people in the Storyville story.
Amazing! Walter Anderson is one of my favourite museums!
We so enjoyed it – especially knowing very little about him before we went. He is such an expressive and interesting artist.