Christer Strömholm: Les Amies de Place Blanche

International Center of Photography, New York

Through Sept. 2

In Christer Strömholm’s photographs, 1950s Paris is “a Never-Never Land of boys who would be girls,” said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Over roughly a decade, the Swedish photographer regularly trained his camera on the cross-dressing males who worked the red-light district near Paris’s Place Blanche, creating a series that captured his vulnerable subjects “with a coolly affectionate eye.” Never are these men cast as grotesques: Some of the 40 or so figures featured in the ICP’s current retrospective “appear nearly as beautiful as any movie star of that era.” At the time, French law actually prohibited men from dressing as women in public, so Strömholm’s project represented “a kind of loving crusade for acceptance of transgendered people.” All these years later, there is “nothing prurient” about these images, yet their effect remains “curiously complicated.”

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Not as complicated as it might have been, said Richard B. Woodward in The Wall Street Journal. Strömholm is sometimes compared to the Hungarian photographer George Brassaï, and at the ICP show he’s even touted as “one of the great photographers of the 20th century.” Though he deserves to be better known here, he never matched the cruel honesty of Brassaï’s 1930s photos of Parisian prostitutes. “Only in a 1959 image of a girl named Nana, anxiously standing at a bar alongside a group of potentially hostile men, does Strömholm reveal the evident dangers and insecurities faced by those who have chosen to radically alter their sexual identity.” Instead of helping us see the truth of the lives these individuals led, Strömholm’s camera flatters his subjects, presenting them as the “slim, desirable” creatures that they dearly wished themselves to be.