Bettina Rheims : modern lovers

Bettina Rheims, Gina Kehayoff

Like many fashion photographers, Bettina Rheims has pursued projects which explore her personal notions of individual beauty, rather than that dictated by magazines and advertising agencies. In her series 'Modern lovers', Rheims subverts fashionable ideals of beauty by portraying the androgyny of young men and women. Her subjects stand awkwardly before the camera against a plain studio backdrop, sometimes looking into the camera, sometimes turning away. Their ambivalence in being photographed is matched by the ambiguity they present to the viewer: these rather feminine men and masculine women confound gender distinctions, but at the same time confirm the homoerotic tendencies prevalent in much fashion photography from the 1990s.