ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm moved to Paris, and found himself in a transgender community. As he photographed “the friends” of this district, he immersed himself in their lived experiences and inner lives. His unique body of work, Les Amies de Place Blanche, is one of the earliest attempts at portraying the singularity of an individual’s transgender subjectivity and its manifestations through kinship. This essay considers his images in the context of current psychoanalytic thought about the imaginary of gender and the notion of gender performativity, starting with the question: How do Strömholm’s photographs attain such extreme visibility when transgender subjectivity defies stable representation? Concerned with anachronism and other mirrored reversals, the essay addresses: What is at stake as the image traverses the body? How can we think about the dialectic of these images so full of contradiction? How does photography, as a visual language, make the transgender body legible, or cause gender to take place through the body as a discourse inscribed in it? Whatever ethic we might attribute to Strömholm’s practice, his photographs celebrate the body and have acquired significant relevance to understanding transgender subjectivity.
