Bettina Rheims Book order

In Bonkers! A Fortnight in London, Bettina Rheims continues to explore the cities that inspire her. After Paris—featured in many of her books—and Shanghai, Rheims now indulges in the wild eccentricities of London, surrounding herself with models, actresses and other beauties on the go—in between catwalks, concerts and parties. Together the women play with the toys and tools of their trade: fashion accessories and costumes thrown into the mix by none other than Vivienne Westwood, lewd disguises and blatant nudity. Bonkers! is a dim, surreal world of female self-expression and eroticism.

Since the early 1980s, Bettina Rheims has been the most sought-after French photographer. From her very beginnings, the female body has been the central focus of her work. Her unusual and provocatvie portrais and nude images each reveal a hidden part of the subject. She regularly caused stirs with projects such as Chambre close (1992), the story of a Paris voyeur watching women in hotels; KIM, a documentary on a transsexual; I.N. R. I. (1999), a sequence on the life of Christ, Shanghai (2004), featuring women in the midst of a powerful cultural, economic and spiritual evolution, and, most recently, Heroines (2006). This volume is a Best of survey of Bettina Rheims' photographic oeuvre of 30 years

Bettina Rheims came to worldwide fame in the early 80s with sensational nudes and portraits. As a sequel to her legendary, mostly black-and-white publication Female Trouble, first published by Schirmer/Mosel in 1989, More Trouble presents new photographic visions of glamour, beauty, fashion, sex, and seduction, created from the 90s to the present day. They include portraits of Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ludivine Sagnier, Emmanuelle Beart, Brooke Shields, Liv Tyler, Isabella Rossellini, Salma Hayek, to name just a few. This time, however, her pictures are mostly in color. And they include men, such as Jackie Chan, Michael Douglas, James King, Tupac Shakur, Mickey Rourke, Marilyn Manson, and Emir Kusturica. Once again, Bettina Rheims proves her extraordinary originality, her empathy, her sense of style, and her feeling for pictorial eroticism.

Famous women - singers and models such as Madonna and Karen Mulder - and anonymous "beauties" pose in provocative outfits, semi-clad or naked in hotel rooms. Chambre Close and Pourquoi m'as-tu abandonnee are being shown for the first time in large format in the Museum of Art in Frankfurt/Main. For a moment it seems as if we are looking through the eyes of a male voyeur. But when we look closer, it becomes clear that we are witnessing a dialogue between women. Women from completely different backgrounds - from an employee of the electricity company to a black police inspector - pursue their own erotic fantasies in hotel rooms, observed by Bettina Rheims, a photographer whose viewpoint at the decisive moment is most definitely not male. But this is not as obvious as it seems, for in spite of the frankness of the photographs, they need to be studied with a great deal of attention.

In X'Mas, 55 young girls below the age of 20 are posing nude, or almost nude, for the first time. All are very pretty, but they do not yet know their own power of seduction. They have been promised Christmas: it is like a rite of passage, a moment of unreality in which the person does not know what the outcome will be. The smiles of the festive season can hide many fears and already some regrets and disappointments. In work carried out during the year 2000, in these 62 photographs Bettina Rheims represents three phases in the coming-of-age of a young girl: The first shows the background of a young girl's own environment, the pinks and blues of junior theatre. The second incorporates a projected backdrop that is between cinema and nightmare and grasps at the dreams and potential of the future. In the third nothing is left, except a person -- a woman in a white box where the ribbon has been cut to reveal that it is the true self that is the real gift.

The artistic collaboration of photographer Bettina Rheims and writer/art critic Serge Bramly began in 1991 with Chambre Close, which Schirmer/Mosel is publishing for the first time. It lives off the stimulating contrast between text and images. The cultivated literary tone of Monsieur X's fictional "confessions" is set against photographs that speak a far clearer language. Bettina Rheims has a command of this language, which tells of female eroticism and exhibitionism as no one else does.