Bettina Rheims

Female Trouble

Serge Bramley

Inri

Philippe Dagen

A Best of... survey of the most sought after French nude and portrait photographer, Bettina Rheims, who makes the female body the central focus of her work. Featuring highly praised and fiercely disputed series such as "Chambre close" (women posing for an imaginary voyeur); KIM (a documentary on a transsexual); I.N.R.I. (a sequence on the life of Christ); women in modern Shanghai, and, most recently, "Heroines".

Can You Find Happiness

Bettina Rheims exhibition

世界を刺激する写真家ベッティナ・ランス展

Bettina Rheims came to worldwide fame in the early 80s with sensational nudes and portraits. As a sequel to her legendary, mostly black-and-white publication Female Trouble, first published by Schirmer/Mosel in 1989, More Trouble presents new photographic visions of glamour, beauty, fashion, sex, and seduction, created from the 90s to the present day. They include portraits of Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ludivine Sagnier, Emmanuelle Beart, Brooke Shields, Liv Tyler, Isabella Rossellini, Salma Hayek, to name just a few. This time, however, her pictures are mostly in color. And they include men, such as Jackie Chan, Michael Douglas, James King, Tupac Shakur, Mickey Rourke, Marilyn Manson, and Emir Kusturica. Once again, Bettina Rheims proves her extraordinary originality, her empathy, her sense of style, and her feeling for pictorial eroticism.

More Trouble

This series of photographs taken for such prestigious top magazines as Egoiste, Details, The Face, Paris-Match, & Detour is a provocative, stimulating & highly sexual collection. The catalogue represents the first comprehensive retrospective of this authors work in Japan.

Animal.

Catherine Millet

The skin of women who have been scratched, mistreated and loved - loved too much. Women who are very real. The cold, artificial light of a studio, like the light that bathed the artists' studios of the nineteenth century. In the center is a big rock made of papier-mache, at once base, pedestal and sculptor's stool. Haute couture dresses that have been torn, abused and recomposed - tragic and sublime, just like the Heroines who wear them. By playing on these four elements. Bettina Rheims transcends portrait, fashion and nude photography and touches on something more secret and intimate - something painful, amorous and captivating that comes more from the soul than from the body. Like in the paintings of Egon Schiele or Lucian Freud. Whether actresses like Milla Jovovich, models like Laetitia Casta or dancers like Blanca Li, whether they embody the vigor of youth or the richness of experience, all the women photographed by Rheims for this new series reveal something of their soul in a way they have never done before. They are radiant with a kind of inner beauty so fascinating that it makes us want to study each square inch of their image with a magnifying glass, just as we would hang on every word of an eventful and deeply moving story.

Bettina Rheims

Books

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