The Photographic Gaze Meets the Medical Gaze: Two Cross-Dressing Men in Christer Strömholm’s Place Blanche

Abstract

In 1963, Christer Strömholm photographed the cross-dressing men Zizou and Carla on successive days in a Paris bar. The images are unique in Strömholm’s Place Blanche archive in that in one photograph Zizou is the “man” and Carla the “woman,” and in the other they switch. Who were Zizou and Carla? Strömholm’s captions for the images do not say. But two years after he photographed them the men were interviewed by a medical school Ph.D. student for a thesis on trans and gender non-conforming prostitutes in Paris. Denise Fidanza’s completed thesis contains detailed summaries of the men’s elicited self-stories. What can be learned about Zizou and Carla by comparing the photographic and verbal evidence? To what extent do the sources align? My analysis reveals that the information conveyed by Strömholm’s photographs and Fidanza’s interviews exists on largely parallel tracks. Indeed, given that the men are identified only by aliases, without the corroborating visual evidence of a distinctive tattoo on Carla’s left arm and a small photograph of Zizou in Fidanza’s thesis, a conclusive match would be impossible. Considered together, Strömholm’s photographs and Fidanza’s interviews provide rich insights into the lives of two marginalized queer men in 1960s Paris.