Bettina Rheims was born in Paris in 1952. Since her first photographs in the late ’70s, Bettina Rheims has defied the predictable. She started photography through work on female strip-tease artists and acrobats. In the end, these series of photographs led to her first exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. It was also the beginning of Rheims as a photographer whose main subject is the female body. From her series on Pigalle strippers (1980) to her cycle on the life of Jesus in I.N.R.I. (1998), from Chanel commercials to Gender Studies (2011), her work has shaken up traditional iconography and pushed restlessly at the breaking point between two great human preoccupations: beauty and imperfection.

Bettina Rheims’ work impresses with a variety of subjects and aesthetics, as well as by the  freedom of her photographic approach. With equal attention to anonymous cast in the street as to such global beauty stars as Kate Moss, Madonna, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell, Bettina Rheims seeks above all to expres her gaze on women.  And more precisely how the magic of an encounter between the artist and her model, who both decide to break the codes of a so-called “eroticism”, manages to build a new image of femininity.

She lives and works in Paris, France.