The shared secret of after-hours love is one of the hardest things to capture with a camera. The Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm was a master of this kind of unaffected moment. After dramatic war years fighting with the resistance in Norway, he had settled in Paris and become a fixture in its cafe society in the 1950s and 1960s. For several years he spent his nights photographing transgender people in Pigalle for a series of pictures, Les Amies de Place Blanche. Often he would end up in Latin Quarter cafes, still with his Leica to hand. This picture was taken in La Methode, a bar famous at the time for its all-night opening hours, and a cast of regulars that included students from the nearby Sorbonne and artists and writers. Serge Gainsbourg was an inevitable habitué.
This picture of young lovers taken in 1960 seems to demand a Gainsbourg backing track, perhaps L’Eau à la bouche – “listen to my beating heart, let yourself be” – which was a hit that year. The couple are adrift and alone together among the drinkers we see in the mirror behind them. Their world seems to have narrowed happily to contemplation of the reflection of the glasses on the tabletop – in contrast to the blurred stare of the man in the mirror, a momentary voyeur, like the photographer himself.
Strömholm died in 2002, aged 83. He was married four times. A new retrospective book of his work includes an interview with Anders Petersen, one of many younger Swedish photographers whom Strömholm taught and mentored, and who went on to create perhaps the definitive book of cafe pictures in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn in the late 60s. Asked about what he learned from Strömholm, Petersen says, “Photographers are lonely, but the realisation that you have shared this loneliness with others gives a very warm feeling of kinship”.
