«A Best of… survey of the most soughtafter French nude and portrait photographer who makes the female body the central focus of her work. Featuring highly praised and fiercely disputed series such as «Chambre close» (women posing for an imaginary voyeur); KIM (a documentary on a transsexual); I.N.R.I. (a sequence on the life of Christ); women in modern Shanghai, and, most recently, «Heroines».»

The first joint project of photographer Bettina Rheims and writer/art critic Serge Bramly. The cultivated literary confessions of Monsieur X, a perfectly discreet voyeur with an obsessive curiosity about the female body, are set against photographs speaking a far clearer language that tells of female eroticism and exhibitionism as no one else does.

Famous for her unusual portraits of women and female nudes, French photographer Bettina Rheims focus is the visualization of female eroticism. She will be celebrated in a major travelling retrospective starting in Helsinki in February 2004. This accompanying book provides a representative overview of her work created between 1979 and 2002.