![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Final_BRheims-use-682x1024.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the balance between everything \u2013\u00a0the clothes and the hair and the make-up and the light. At one point it\u2019s perfect, and the picture is there.\u201d Bettina Rheims is certainly an authority on creation of ideal images: since the early Eighties, this influential practitioner has taken impressive photographs, many of which rank as visual landmarks of our times. Alongside her portraits of celebrities and the French cultural elite\u00a0\u2013\u00a0Madonna, Yves Saint Laurent, Marguerite Duras and others \u2013 she made herself a name with the creation of often erotic, provocative art and fashion photography.<\/p>\n
Her latest work \u2013\u00a0something Rheims terms \u201ccompletely new and different\u201d and \u201creal\u201d \u2013 is now on display at the London Hamiltons Gallery. \u201cGender Studies\u201d portrays 25 individuals whose classification into normative gender roles fail. It could be seen as a continuation of her long-running preoccupation with the human body and its relationship to gender. Starting with voyeuristic photographs of more or less naked women in revealing poses, she soon became interested in people who combine both the male and the female. \u201cWe all have another part in us\u201d, says Rheims.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been commented before that she manages to look at women from a man\u2019s perspective, maybe that\u2019s also the source of her ongoing fascination. In \u201cModern Lovers\u201d, an art series including the very first picture of Kate Moss in 1993, she approached the subject as an examination with identity. \u201cKim\u201d followed in 1994, a book project about the transsexual Kim Harlow who later died of Aids. Some 20 years later \u201cGender Studies\u201d serves as an update work to what gender could also mean today.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The project started by snooping around on Facebook and undertaking lengthy castings on Skype before she alighting upon transgender-mannequins, including that embodiment of androgyny par excellence, the Bosnian-Australian model Andrej Pejic. The biggest change as against Rheims\u2019 former projects was the existence of what she calls the \u201cthird gender\u201d: another, neither female nor male, but something in between. \u201cThe most fascinating thing I discovered was that a lot of people didn\u2019t want to change sex,\u201d she remarks. \u201cThey are on that thin line of ultimate freedom to say, \u2018We don\u2019t want to choose. This is our freedom of life, we wanna keep on living like that.\u2019”<\/p>\n
For Rheims, who has been in contact with Camera Work for a long time, this was the \u201cperfect project to start a collaboration\u201d \u2013 and hopefully not her last experience in Berlin, a city where balance may be hard to find, but where the nuances of gender are accepted. Long ago seduced by the town\u2019s galleries, museums and currywurst she grins: \u201cI love the city.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n