The AIPAD Photography Show opens to the public on Thursday, and will feature will feature galleries from across the U.S. and around the world. New exhibitors this year include Feroz Galerie, Bonn, Germany; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York and San Francisco; Paci Contemporary, Brescia, Italy; Grundemark-Nilsson Gallery, Berlin and Stockholm; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles.

Among its offerings, Grundemark-Nilsson Gallery will feature images by Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) whose noirish work and ethos have influenced contemporary photographers in Europe and beyond. In Paris during the 1950s, he gravitated to the red-light district around the Place Blanche, where he was drawn to a subculture of cross-dressing young men, many of whom worked as prostitutes to earn enough money for sex-change operations. For more than a decade he hung out with them and photographed them in their night-time milieu with a coolly affectionate eye.

His 10-year documentation, Les Amies de Place Blanche, was first published in 1982 (20 years after it was shot) and was recently re-editioned by the French pubisher Aman Iman. A selection of images from the book was exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 2012.

The 1982 version of the book quickly sold out and, as far as the audience for photography in America was concerned, remained pretty much invisible. At the time, the subject matter was still part of an unspoken underground, a shadow world that was repressed and whose occupants were constantly harassed by the authorities.

But Christer’s friends were a glamorous lot whose femininity, high-style fashions, hairdos and makeup was unquestionable. When looking through the book, what you see is a cast of charismatic stars that might have emerged from a Fellini set. When the photographs were shown as part of a 1980 exhibition of Christer’s work, held in a gallery within a Stockholm department store, it wasn’t until the show was up for three days that the organizers realized that les amies were not what they had thought; the photographs were immediately taken down.

Christer followed several of the friends through their gradual transformation from male to female. As a witness to their world but never a voyeur, he created a lush and sensitive album that was, as he wrote, “about obtaining the freedom to choose one’s own life and identity.” The difficulties of being constantly arrested, and not being able to find work beyond the hustle, made for anxiety and melancholy under the repressive de Gaulle regime. One of the most glamorous of the friends, for example, was approached by Vogue magazine for a modeling assignment; without an ID that matched her appearance, however, she could not take the job.

Comparisons between the work of Christer Strömholm and Diane Arbus are inevitable, but the images could hardly be more different in approach. While both photographers were intrigued by people living beyond the margins of society, Arbus’s cool eye has the effect of distancing her subjects from the viewer; Christer’s empathy with his subjects does quite the opposite. Perhaps because he returned often to Place Blanche over a long period of time, he was able to encapsulate a drama that unfolds gradually in the pages of the beautifully printed book (Aman Iman 2011).

The AIPAD Photography Show runs from Thursday through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at 67^th Street, NY, NY. Information. The Grundemark Nilsson Gallery is at Booth 407. Information. CV19.BOOK.PHOTO