Jacky, Paris

Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection
Section: Self-presentation
Gaëtane Niquet (d. 2017) sang and danced under the stage name Jacky at Le Carrousel and L’Alcazar in Paris from the late 1950s through the 1970s. She and her friends were
young transgender women struggling to live as women and to raise money for sex-change operations when they met Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm in
the early 1960s. Although they must have been harassed and vulnerable, these women present themselves to the photographer and the viewer as glamorous, elegant, and
confident women worthy of adoration. In Place Blanche, the heart of Paris’s red-light district, Strömholm lived with these women and became friends with them. This immersion allowed photographer and subjects to create intimate, empathetic, and lush portraits.