Bettina Rheims
[Photographer, b. 1952, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, lives in Paris.]
I shoot women because I know them…. It’s more exciting for me to penetrate a woman’s mind. It’s like doing a self-portrait.

I think that I first started to shoot naked women because I wanted my father to look at my images and father liked very pretty women.

I still find myself having to justify being a woman taking pictures of naked women. It never occurred to me that there was something bizarre about it, it always felt very natural.

… as soon as I grab a camera, all uncertainty vanishes.

I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is
personal work.... In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones.

I was looking for something to make me want to get out of bed in the morning. But my then partner gave me a camera—with this square lens you had to hold on your stomach and look down on to focus—and when I looked through that little square, I knew I was home.
