This Rheims retrospective showcases more than 300 photographs from 35 years of daring, often defiant photography. Personally selected and assembled by Rheims, the collection brings together renowned series such as Chambre close, Héroïnes, and Rose, c’est Paris. Spanning commercial work and artistic series, the retrospective impresses with each turn of the page, as much for the strength of each image as for the thrilling variety of Rheims’s subjects and aesthetics.
With equal attention to anonymous subjects cast in the street as to global celebrities including Kate Moss, Madonna, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell, the book showcases Rheims’s particular interest in female fragility and strength, and of the magic encounter between model and artist which disrupts codes of so-called eroticism to build up a new image system for womanhood.