35 years of daring, defiant photography

Since her first photographs in the late ’70s, Bettina Rheims has defied the predictable. From her series on Pigalle strippers (1980) to her cycle on the life of Jesus in I.N.R.I. (1998), from Chanel commercials to Gender Studies (2011), her work has shaken up traditional codes of representation and pushed restlessly at the breaking point between two great human preoccupations: beauty and imperfection.

This Rheims retrospective showcases more than 300 photographs from 35 years of daring, often defiant photography. Personally selected and assembled by Rheims, the collection brings together renowned series such as Chambre close, Héroïnes, and Rose, c’est Paris. Spanning commercial work and artistic series, the retrospective impresses with each turn of the page, as much for the strength of each image as for the thrilling variety of Rheims’s subjects and aesthetics. With equal attention to anonymous subjects cast in the street as to global celebrities including Kate Moss, Madonna, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell, the book showcases Rheims’s particular interest in female fragility and strength, and of the magic encounter between model and artist which disrupts codes of so-called eroticism to build up a new image system for womanhood.

The photographer
Bettina Rheims is a French fine art and fashion photographer. She first won acclaim with a dramatic series of portraits of striptease artists and acrobats, gaining a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou aged just 29. She has worked on advertising campaigns for major brands including Chanel and Lancôme, and taken portraits of such famous individuals as Charlotte Rampling, Marianne Faithfull, and Claudia Schiffer. Rheims won the Grand Prix de la Photographie de la Ville de Paris in 1994 and the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2002.

The editor
Patrick Remy has authored several publications and launched two book series, namely Fashion Images de Mode and Strip/Paradise/Desire/Sensation (Steidl). He has also published a number of photographers’ monographs and organized several fashion photography exhibitions, in particular in Miami, Tokyo, and Melbourne. He lives and works in Paris.