Bettina Rheims

Born in 1952 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Bettina Rheims developed a passion for photography at a very young age, learning the art of darkroom printing as a teenager. 

She later trained with photographers such as photojournalist Walter Carone. She began her career as a professional photographer in 1978 at the age of 26, after working as a model and journalist.  

She produced her first portraits of public figures and her first fashion and advertising commissions. In 1980, she photographed carnival strippers in Pigalle and acrobats. These series were the subject of two solo exhibitions in 1981 at the Centre Pompidou and the Texbraun Gallery in Paris. In 1982, she began her series Animal , black-and-white portraits of stuffed animals from the Deyrolle store in Paris.  

Alongside her commissions for magazines, movie posters, and album covers, she has been developing her personal work. In it, she explores femininity, gender, and identity through her series Female Trouble (1989), Kim (1990) and Modern Lovers (1990). This period also saw his collaboration with the novelist Serge Bramly on Close Room (1990–1992), the first major color series in Bettina Rheims’s body of work. This collaborative effort would continue for I. N. R. I. (1998) and Rose is Paris (2010), which would bring the photographer international acclaim. Narrative plays an important role and is an integral part of their work, immersing the viewer in a world while allowing them to create their own interpretation.  

On a completely different note, she painted a presidential portrait of Jacques Chirac (1995). He personally awarded her the Legion of Honor in 2007. 

During the 2000s, Bettina Rheims revisited the issue of gender—a recurring theme in much of her work—through the androgynous bodies of Gender Studies (2011). This period was also marked by three trips to Shanghai with Serge Bramly, where she portrayed women torn between a rapidly changing society and the country’s traditional culture (series Shanghai , 2003).  

During the 2010s, encouraged by Robert Badinter, she learned about the conditions of women’s incarceration in France and produced the series Female Inmates (2014), consisting of fifty portraits of women in prison. More recently, she has explored the female body as a political tool and captured the Femen activists in her series Naked War (2017).  

In 2021, after donating her collection to the Institut pour la photographie, she left her Paris studio, where she had worked for nearly forty years. To preserve a record of this unique space, a virtual tour now allows visitors to explore the photographer’s studio.