Détenues, La Chapelle, Rose c'est Paris

Bettina Rheims donated her entire collection to the Institut pour la photographie: archives—negatives, contact sheets, test prints, and paper archives; exhibition prints, final prints, press materials, publications, record sleeves, etc.

In this context, the Institut pour la photographie is pleased to present three projects that are emblematic of Bettina Rheims’s career: commissioned works and personal projects that reveal her approach to portraiture and the importance of staging. 

↘︎ Rose c'est Paris,  2010 - Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly 
Rose c'est Paris is a coming-of-age journey through an intimate Paris, captured through Bettina Rheims’s lens in a fictional story conceived in collaboration with Serge Bramly. The two authors imagined scenes together, like a series of living tableaux: a young woman named B. Is searching for Rose, her twin sister, whom she claims has gone missing. The Institut pour la photographie presents an initial study comparing the photographer’s archives with the final images of her personal project, which marks an important milestone in the artist’s career. 

↘︎ Détenues ("Female inmates"),  2014
With Détenues , created in 2014, she engages with incarcerated women and uses photography to capture their individuality. Encouraged by Robert Badinter, Bettina Rheims created a series of portraits of incarcerated women in four French prisons. This series of 50 portraits, her most recent personal project, was exhibited in the Sainte-Chapelle at the Château de Vincennes. 

↘︎ La Chapelle ("The Chapel"),  2018-2021
The Chapel is an immersive installation that the photographer developed in 2018 by reinterpreting the work resulting from her collaboration with the American men's magazine Details from 1994 to 1997. With the help of stylist Bill Mullen and armed with complete creative freedom, she depicted a scandalous, underground L. A. Most of these irreverent images have become iconic, blurring the line between art and commercial work. Among the film and B-movie actresses featured are a few men—a rarity in Bettina Rheims’ body of work, as she prefers to focus on issues of femininity. 

↘︎ Curating: Carole Sandrin and Gabrielle de la Selle

↘︎ In collaboration with: Bettina Rheims and Gwénaëlle Petit-Pierre