Author Description

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.