Christer Strömholm Estate - Les Amies de Place Blanche

Christer Strömholm Estate — Les Amies de Place Blanche

Exhibition from September 6, 2023 to March 25, 2024
Centre Pompidou, Galerie 2
Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris

Opening hours
Open daily from 11am to 9pm except Tuesdays.
11am – 11pm every Thursday.

As part of the group exhibition “Corps à corps – Histoire(s) de la photographie”.

In the 1960s, Christer Strömholm began a photographic series on transvestites and the trans community in Pigalle, which he published some twenty years later in a book entitled Les Amies de Place Blanche (1983).

In it, he recounts the daily life of these marginal figures of Paris’s nightlife, at a time when homosexuality was still widely stigmatized.

Strömholm’s images, though tinged with a certain melancholy, exalt the freedom of these prostitutes living outside established norms, even in their most intimate moments.

At a time when so-called humanist photography was triumphing in France, often giving a picturesque, reassuring vision of the city, Strömholm developed a darker, more contrasted image aesthetic, offering a subjective, jarring vision.

“These are images of people whose lives I shared and whom I believe I understood.

These are images of women born biologically male and called “transsexuals.”

I call them “my friends from Place Blanche”. This friendship was born here, in the early sixties, and it’s still going on.”

– Christer Strömholm Estate