Bettina Rheims: stars laid bare

and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie have always shared an intimate bond. So what better place than the one whose still-fallow spaces she took over in 1990 to exhibit her series, and where she stirred controversy in 2000 with , to present today — for the first time in Paris — a journey through forty years of photography?

Bettina Rheims; 40 years of photography

From her first photographs to her most recent personal work, the exhibition, conceived as a journey, weaves together legendary series, Bettina Rheims's iconic images, and some more confidential works — or pieces never before shown in France. Neither thematic nor chronological, this sensitive itinerary aims to spotlight Bettina Rheims's obsessions around her favourite subject: woman, in all her states. Femininity — questioned, exposed, magnified — is the thread running through the three floors of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, offering surprises and unexpected parallels among the 180 images on display.

The blog "L'oeil de Fred" offers a preview of this journey, in its article dedicated to the Bettina Rheims exhibition.

Drawing the visitor immediately into the cast of characters that populate Bettina Rheims's work, the exhibition's first room serves as a true visual introduction. Standing before these initial prints — monumental, intimidating or moving, troubling or fascinating — the visitor is confronted, in a life-size face-to-face, with the codes of femininity, and more broadly with the question of identity. For Bettina Rheims's eye embraces transgressions and abolishes conventions to reveal the deepest and most universal intimacy. From there, a play of mirrors begins…

Bettina Rheims in a few dates

Bettina Rheims has appropriated the codes of nude photography in order to subvert them and place the question of femininity at the heart of her practice. She endangers as much as she sublimates the beauty of her models. Laid bare, faltering or triumphant, they unsettle and intimidate the viewer. Beyond the question of femininity, Bettina Rheims has also explored gender, pushing the codes of representation with her series Modern Lovers (1990), shown here alongside its most recent counterpart, Gender Studies (2011) and the series Espionnes (1992). It is always a laying bare — of bodies but also of the deepest feelings of these beings who reveal themselves in an ambiguous in-between. This interest in the equivocal and the play of opposites also shines through in the series Shanghai (2002). Photographing unexpected scenes, Bettina Rheims shows Chinese women caught between the culture they grew up with and a fantasised modernity.

A brilliant portraitist, Bettina Rheims has imprinted on the collective imagination the faces that populate her world. Her heroines — anonymous or famous women who have passed before her lens — are photographed with the same benevolence, as the exhibition's design suggests by setting side by side the portraits of 2000s music idols and those of women held in French prisons, her latest series. Bettina Rheims is above all a maker of images, who upholds in her practice a centuries-old pictorial tradition. Most of Bettina Rheims's photographs bear witness to that heritage, notably through their work on composition and narrative. They are built to tell a story — whether that of Christ in the series I.N.R.I. (2000) or that of those Héroïnes (2005), mysterious allegories of melancholy — a series that marks, for Bettina Rheims, a return to the tradition of the view camera.

Bettina Rheims at the MEP — practical info

From Thursday 28 January 2016 to Sunday 27 March 2016. Maison européenne de la photographie — 5-7 rue de Fourcy — Paris 75004. Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 8pm. The exhibition catalogue is published by Taschen and available at: