Photography: Les Amies de Place Blanche, By Christer Strömholm

Gina & Nana, Place Blanche 1963 (Dewi Lewis)

Even in 1983 when it was first published, the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm wrote in the foreword of the book that made his name: "These images are from another time."

A book of nightlife documentary and informal portraits of his friends – who were all transvestites, transexuals or prostitutes – on the Place Blanche in Montmartre, Paris, in the 1950s and 1960s, it is about "the quest for self-identity, about the right to live," he says, as well as, more evocatively: "a book about humiliation, about the smell of whores and night life in the cafés."