Bettina Rheims’s latest exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie presents a destabilizing, seductive vision of femininity. Across 180 images—ranging from actresses and models to people far from the spotlight—Rheims interrogates the aesthetic codes that have long defined how we look at women. Her figures are femme fatales, but not in the conventional cinematic sense; they’re magnificent precisely because they are unsettling, and terrifying because their power is undeniable.
A singular voice in contemporary French photography, Rheims has repeatedly returned to one subject: women. Her portraits refuse passivity, instead staging women who seize control of their image, their sexuality, and the gaze fixed upon them. The result is a body of work that feels both glamorous and disquieting, meticulously composed yet emotionally volatile.
Rheims’s images often echo the provocation of Helmut Newton while diverging in intent. Where Newton fetishized a polished ideal, Rheims fractures it, letting ambiguity and agency seep through the gloss. The women here dominate the frame—beautiful, surreal, and unapologetically self-possessed—occupying poses that toggle between overt sensuality and enigmatic refusal.
One unforgettable photograph features Monica Bellucci, eyes locked with the viewer as she licks tomato-red fingertips in a Formica kitchen. She tips a bottle of ketchup over a plate of spaghetti, the glossy red latex of her dress mirroring the stain on her hands. It’s domesticity twisted into spectacle, a tableau as camp as it is carnal, daring us to question who is consuming whom.
Rheims’s gaze also turns toward women who are often unseen. Her portraits of prison inmates probe identity under constraint, asking what remains of selfhood when autonomy is systematically curtailed. The camera becomes a stage for reinvention, or at least a space where the performance of self can be momentarily reclaimed.
In the series “Rose c’est Paris,” naked figures move through the city like apparitions—on stairwells, rooftops, and boulevards—composing a mysterious, cinematic map of desire and displacement. These photographs read like fragments of a dream: riddles without answers, their power residing in the friction between exposure and concealment.
What ties this work together is the insistence that looking is never innocent. Rheims asks us to sit with discomfort, to notice when seduction turns to unease, and to acknowledge how images shape our expectations of femininity. Her femmes fatales don’t destroy men so much as they dismantle the clichés that have long constrained women—replacing them with images as complex, contradictory, and alive as their subjects.
Source: Adapted from Time Out
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12-14 December 2025
