"Lee [Friedlander]: The impression I've had is that nobody seems to really know Bellocq.
Johnny [Wiggs, a cornetist from New Orleans]: No, he was awful hard to get to know. And of course nobody was that interested in knowing him. I mean, there was a funny looking guy, you know, and he wasn't interested in whether you were nice to him or not."

He might have been a "hydrocephalic semi-dwarf" (Friedlander's word in the book) or not (see Goldin's article) - people love a good story, and why shouldn't we? But regardless, what really matters are the photographs - portraits of Storyland prostitutes, some very formally posed (backdrops were being used), others maybe a bit less so (several of the women manage to hold a natural looking smile). Three of the women are holding and/or playing with dogs; many of them clearly are very much at ease with the photographer - whoever he was, Bellocq knew what he was doing: His photography reflects the tremendous respect and compassion he must have felt for his subjects. I'm using the word compassion not because the women were prostitutes, I'm using it because they were being treated as equals by the photographer - and not as subject matters.

If you haven't seen the photographs you owe it to yourself to go to a library to look at the book - or to buy it. I found it at a local second-hand bookshop; this, of course, required a bit of luck (plus the existence of such shops, which are disappearing at an alarming rate in the US). There exists a newer version, expanded and with a foreword by Susan Sontag, but since there is nothing wrong with this book...

Books like Sawdust Mountain are proof of how valuable fine-art photography really has become. For years now, budgets for the arts have been slashed, and newspapers are dying (who wants to read a newspaper when all it does is trying to compete with TV?). The recent "in this economy" mantra has proven to be just another convenient excuse to cut even more "costs". But for the most part, fine-art photographers have been undeterred. Sure, it has become harder and harder to get grants, and there is more and more competition. But to an increasing extent, fine-art photography is now filling gaps in areas where previously a newspaper might have paid a reporting team to cover a topic in-depth.

I see this development as one of the reasons why books like Sawdust Mountain are so special. There is a lot of talk about "citizen journalism". I don't know what an equivalent term would be for books like Sawdust Mountain. But regardless of what it might be, with photographers like Eirik Johnson producing bodies of work that address vital issues in ways that are harder and harder to find elsewhere, it is time for us to give these photographers the credit they deserve.

If you think this is a bad idea, here's something to be aware of: "A recent article by Charlie Finch [...] posits that it will be collectors that will need to lead the art world out of the recession. My answer as a collector is that this is almost certainly true; we as buyers need to grease the wheels of the system by prudently getting back in the game and supporting the galleries and artists that we care about. But my challenge to the gallerists out there is as follows: your summer group shows are driving real collectors away."