Vintage silver print 16,3 x 24 cm (6.4 x 9.4 in)
Photographer’s stamp from Borgmästargatan (late 1960s) Christer Strömholm estate stamp, and various handwritten notations on the reverse
PROVENANCE Estate of Christer Strömholm
LITERATURE Joakim Strömholm (ed.), PS.- Post Scriptum. Christer Strömholm, Stockholm 2002, p. 68; Hans-Michael Koetzle (ed.): Eyes on Paris, Munich 2011, p. 350-353; Christer Strömholm, Les amies de Place Blanche, Aman Iman 2012, back cover.

In the late 1950s, Strömholm moved to Place Blanche in Pigalle, the Paris nightclub district. For the next years, he lived door to door with transsexuals, transvestites and male prostitutes. Strömholm adapted to their rhythm: at night he packed up his pipe, his Leica and a few rolls of the legendary black-and-white Tri-X films and accompanied his new friends on their nightly forays into the streets of Paris. Shooting these scenes, he worked exclusively with availabl
e light, so that the milieu is part of his images, but most of its details disappear in the darkness. Still during the night, Strömholm would develop the films in an improvised darkroom in his hotel room, in order to be able to show them to the group the next day. He affectionately called them his “girlfriends”, Jackie and Nana, Sylvia and Suzanne, to name but a few.
Strömholm’s images are not voyeuristic or preying, but speak of great respect, closeness and a growing intimacy. “These are images of people whose lives I shared and whom I think I understood,” thus he described his pictures, which long remained unpublished. Only in 1983 did the series appear in print, entitled Vännerna Fran Place Blanche (Friends from Place Blanche). With this volume, a sought-after rarity today, Strömholm celebrated people who felt they were strangers, lived differently, and as often as not – due to drugs, illness, suicide – died young.