The ObserverArt and design books This article is more than 12 years oldReviewLes amies de Place Blanche by Christer Strömholm – review
This article is more than 12 years oldChrister Strömholm's compelling portraits of transsexuals in 50s Paris capture his subjects' pride and camaraderieChrister Strömholm, who died in 2002, is known as the father of Swedish photography both for his abiding influence and for his role as a teacher. In the late 1950s and early 60s, he lived in Paris intermittently and it was there that he created his most famous book, Les amies de Place Blanche – portraits of the often glamorous transsexuals who comprised a subculture within a subculture in the red-light district around Pigalle. It has now been reissued with newly commissioned essays by two of the women featured in the book, Jackie and Nana.
Originally published in 1983, Les amies de Place Blanche brought Strömholm both great acclaim and a degree of notoriety. The black-and-white photographs, shot at night in available light, merge street photography and portraiture and are, by turns, glamorous and gritty. They capture a lost Paris, sleazy yet stylish, subterranean yet flamboyant, at a time when General de Gaulle was in power and intent on creating an ultra-conservative France that echoed his strict Roman Catholic values. To this end, he reintroduced a long-forgotten law that allowed the state to seize the property of landlords who allowed their premises to be used by prostitutes.
The "night birds" Strömholm photographed worked the streets around Place Blanche at considerable risk, hoping to raise money to travel to Casablanca for the expensive operation that would complete their gender transformation. Most of them did not realise their dream.
Strömholm was initially drawn to the area's edgy subterranean nightlife: the peep shows, the strip clubs, the prostitutes and their pimps. Like his subjects, he worked into the early hours, trawling the streets, befriending and photographing his subjects. For a time, he lived on the fifth floor of the Hôtel Chappe, where six of the transsexuals featured in the book also lived. As Christian Caujolle, the owner of the Vu photography agency in Paris, notes, Strömholm "shared their early afternoon breakfasts… watched them put on make-up and clothes, went down with them to the streets as they solicited for clients". This was a kind of insider reportage based on trust and friendship. "Everyone knew what I was doing," Strömholm wrote later. "I never took stolen pictures." It shows.
The transsexuals of Place Blanche led a hard life of often dogged survival, but in the photographs, one senses a camaraderie – between the "girls" and between the photographer and his subject – as well as an almost celebratory defiance. Gina and Nana pose like glamorous film stars, Martine like an exotic circus performer, and Jackie like someone who could just as easily have hung out at Andy Warhol's Factory in New York in the late 1960s. Strömholm offered them total self-expression and they responded accordingly.
Les amies de Place Blanche is, as Strömholm wrote in his original foreword, a book "about insecurity… about humiliation… about the quest for self-identity and the right to live". These themes are not immediately apparent in these wonderful portraits, though, which often have a glamour that befits their subjects' exaggerated self-image, their often unrealisable dreams and desires. A book of longing, then, and a true classic of postwar European photography.
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