Twenty years after Modern Lovers, a body of work on androgyny and transgender created when AIDS was at its peak, Bettina Rheims now presents her Gender Studies. She writes: Yesterday, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I was strolling along the Seine trying to reach the right bank. Paris was full of police cars blocking access to the bridges, while masses of people, normal families, were rushing towards the center of town. They were carrying aggressive banners displaying homophobic and racist statements, and refused to acknowledge the existence of gender theory. Three years earlier I had placed an ad on Facebook encouraging young men and women who felt different to contact my studio. We received dozens of replies, from all over the world, like faraway calls wanting to be heard. It was my aim to show them and give them a voice-to acknowledge them. They came to the studio, exposed themselves shyly, and I photographed them just like that. In the light of current controversial debates on gender theory, Rheims' models display remarkable courage by questioning, modifying and celebrating their identities.

Bettina Rheims has been one of the most acclaimed woman photographers of France since the early 80s, when she first showed her sensational female nudes and portraits. Film stars, actresses and artists, models, friends, country fair acrobats and strippers— known and unknown women have posed in front of her lens during the past twenty years. Female Trouble, first published in 1989 by Schirmer/Mosel, presents a selection of some one hundred photographs—brilliant studies on womankind mostly in black and white, her favored technique mastered with a unique subtlety. The common denominator of this collection of photographs is Rheims’ sensitive and delicate relation with her sitters, revealing an extraordinary originality, empathy, sense of style and feeling for both the manifold facets of femininity and pictorial eroticism. The plates are preceded by an introductory essay by Catherine Deneuve.