Following the death of photographer Ernest J. Bellocq in 1949, a set of glass plate negatives of his photographs of prostitutes from the city's notorious Storeyville district was discovered in a local antiques shop and came into the possession of art dealer Larry Borenstein. In the early 1960s he asked another New Orleans photographer, Dan Leyrer, to make up a set of prints from them. Stored by Borenstein in an old bathroom in the slave quarters behind Preservation Hall, the famous jazz venue that he had opened in 1961, the negatives were subsequently acquired by photographer Lee Friedlander, who in 1970 exhibited a set of prints that he had made at New York's Museum of Modern Art, but the example seen right, was an earlier Leyrer print.
