"Why did you abandon me?"

The Charles Nègre Museum of Photography is presenting, for the first time in Nice, an exhibition dedicated to Bettina Rheims, an internationally renowned portrait and fashion photographer who has been developing a multifaceted body of personal work for over forty years.

In the early 1990s, Bettina Rheims worked in France and the United States, where she collaborated with international magazines and took on one commission after another: fashion and advertising campaigns, celebrity portraits, and promotional images for films. Amid all these commissions, certain images stood out and became works of art. They fit so precisely into her personal body of work that Bettina Rheims decided to remove them from their original context and gradually bring them together to create the iconic series Why did you abandon me? which includes the 29 works on display.

A brilliant portrait photographer, Bettina Rheims has a knack for revealing the personalities and emotions of her subjects. She presents us with evocative, unsettling, and touching images. Her subjects—whether famous or not—are always photographed with kindness and open themselves up to the camera without reservation.

Charles Nègre Museum Website