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.