On Her Own: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia

On Her Own: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia

From her first collection of poems, Domestic Work, Natasha Trethewey has been engaged with photography, not only as the subject of her poems but also as a means of re-inscribing the identity lost or put under erasure of her African American ancestors. This restoration project comes into a full bloom in her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia. An imaginative reading of the series of portraiture of New Orleans prostitutes by an early twentieth-century photographer E. J. Bellocq, Bellocq’s Ophelia gives a name as well as a voice to an anonymous woman in the pictures, a woman subjected to multiple marginalization—an African American female sex worker, and of miscegenetic origin, to boot. In so doing, Trethewey also explores a way to move beyond the conventional bifurcation regarded inherent in photography as an apparatus of looking, namely that of the model/victim and the photographer/gazer.