Photography: Les Amies de Place Blanche, By Christer Strömholm
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."
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