The book, and the work, is billed as a family album, but it is, in fact, a shockingly intimate and sensitive portrayal of transgender women decades before such depictions became expected or even widely seen. Many of the women in the book were sex workers or performers at cabarets (and occasionally freak shows). Though eventually some became high-society women, life on Place Blanche was precarious. Mr. Strömholm’s work does not shy away from these realities, but as a whole his body of work centers on his subjects’ dignity.

“When dawn approached, at about six in the morning, the Metro was reopening,” he wrote. “We drank our hot chocolates; bought the newspaper. We walked quietly along the boulevard, up the rue Lepic to go back to our small hotel rooms. In Paris, it was morning, but for the friends of the place Blanche, it was still nighttime. My friends lived together in a world apart, a world of shadows and loneliness, anxiety, hopelessness and alienation. The only thing they demanded was to have the right to be themselves, not to be forced to deny or repress their feelings, to have the right to live their own lives, to be responsible, to be at ease with themselves. Nothing more. It was then — and still is — about attaining the right to own one’s own life and identity.”