"Les Libertines" comes from my New Orleans artist residency from July of 2018. I came across the work of E.J. Bellocq, a photographer of women of Storyville in 1910’s New Orleans. He notoriously photographed the red light district, candid nudes, and had a mysterious tendency to scratch out the faces in some of his original negatives. In my body of work, I took inspiration from these themes in my graphite drawings as I reimagine classical portraits of prostitutes from this time period.