"Bellocq has been described as an insane dwarf," Rose said. "He's become a Paul Bunyanesque myth. I haven't been able to find out that there was anything unusual about him at all. I got his medical records. No mention of deformity. At least half the stories report him as a regular guy."

Friedlander is reluctant to talk about the man. "I've never been too interested in Bellocq's story," he says. "I was interested in the pictures. I'm not a historian. I asked a few people questions. I did a little tape recording for John Szarkowski."

Bellocq seems to incite debate. In 1996 writer Janet Malcolm floated up a remarkable idea about a normalized Bellocq in the New York Review of Books: Why even assume the women he photographed were whores? Rex Rose had searched the New Orleans Police Department's photographic records of women arrested for prostitution and never found any faces that matched the subjects of Bellocq's photos. This is inconclusive, of course, because prostitution was legal in Storyville, but one of these girls might have strayed past Iberville Street.

At the Saul Gallery talk, panelist Steven Maklansky, curator of photography at New Orleans Museum, pointed out that in some of the photographs the double parlor doors in the background have been blocked with furniture or wires "so no one could walk in on them." Is this precaution necessary in a whorehouse? Malcolm herself eventually disregarded her idea that the women weren't chippies and reported that Lee Friedlander told her that the wallpaper in some of the photographs had been identified as that which had once lined the rooms inside Lulu White's Mahogany Hall bordello.

Indeed, in the earlier 1970s MoMA booklet, horn man Mr. Wiggs tells a long anecdote about salvaging a bunch of Mahogany Hall wallpaper samples when the old whorehouse was torn down. "I wouldn't take the wallpaper home because I'd have to answer too many questions," he reported. Mr. Wiggs' lengthy anecdote continues with his story of how he saved the wallpaper in disinfectant, but a cleaning lady burned it.

Since the assumption that Bellocq was a physical freak has been challenged, let's toy with the idea that the women in his photos were not prostitutes. After all, there was no professional reason for those women to pose nude for Bellocq. Although various Storyville "blue books" were printed containing professional portraits advertising the girls, each whore was always dressed. Prostitution may have been legal, but photos of naked women brought the vice squad. (A panelist at the Saul Gallery even complained of the historical lack of nude photography found in New Orleans.)

"The best explanation is that the [women in the photos] are Bellocq's lovers," suggested one Joseph L. Ruby of Silver Spring, Md., in a letter to the editors of the New York Review of Books on Jan. 9, 1997. "The photos are a personal record of mutually enjoyable sexual relationships." After the magazine printed Ruby's suggestion, Janet Malcolm rather unconvincingly shot down his idea by pointing out that Edward Weston's lovers always look "grave, almost grim" in his nude photos of them while Bellocq's Storyville prostitutes are cheerful, thus proving the "uncomplicated platonic nature of their relationship to the photographer. [They] are horsing around with a pal who has a camera."

So probably they're whores just horsing around. But again, maybe not. We'll never know for sure. Another mystery concerning Bellocq's photos are the defaced women. Roughly a dozen negatives have the models' faces rubbed off in a black swirl. The resulting prints look as if Jackson Pollock has doodled over the naked women's faces. "Why are some of the faces scratched out?" Lee Friedlander asks rhetorically. "Nobody knows. I think Bellocq did it himself, but there is no way to know. Some people think his brother, the Jesuit priest, did it, but I think that's silly. I don't really know." Then Friedlander says, "Maybe Bellocq had some ... " He pauses, and says, "Maybe he was ... " And pauses again. "I just don't know," he says. "I haven't a clue."

Whoever did it for whatever reasons, "These [defaced] pictures are actually painful to look at," Susan Sontag wrote in a foreword to a 1996 edition of Bellocq's work. Sontag added, "But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution. The part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic ease, and the tangibleness of their vanished world."

Whatever one thinks about prostitution, only a few will be able to afford these women at today's prices. The ones that hang in the Julie Saul Gallery are one-of-a-kind, created by Dan Leyrer before Friedlander bought the negatives in the 1960s. The most expensive one goes for a cool $45,000, but you can buy the nude reclining among the university football pillows for just $25,000.

Lee Friedlander's quick and final words on the photographer that he and John Szarkowski unleashed on the world: "I just thought they were beautiful pictures. I just wanted to keep them going if I could. I'm only interested in the pictures. Whatever romance anyone wants to have with Bellocq, let them have it."