Art Review
Street Hustlers, in All Their Glamour and Grit
Christer Strömholm at International Center of Photography
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: June 21, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/arts/design/christer-stromholm-at-international-center-of-photography.htmlIn Paris in the mid-1950s the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) gravitated to the red-light district around the Place Blanche, where he was drawn to a subculture of cross-dressing young men, many of whom worked as prostitutes to earn enough money for sex-change operations. The stocky, middle-aged photographer with a beard and military haircut hung out with them for more than a decade and photographed them on the street at night and in bars and hotel rooms with a coolly affectionate eye.
In 1983, Strömholm's noirish black-and-white pictures of his sexually ambiguous subjects were published in a volume that has since become a classic of book-length photographic essays, and it helped establish him as an eminence of post-World War II photography. "Les Amies de Place Blanche" at the International Center of Photography takes its title from that tome and presents 40 of the more than 140 pictures that appeared in it. An expanded edition of the hard-to-find first edition — with new essays, letters, contact sheets and autobiographic reminiscences — has recently been published. It is a fascinating time capsule.
