Bettina Rheims, Serge Bramly - SHANGHAI - 2003

Bettina Rheims was successively a model, journalist, and gallery owner before dedicating herself to photography. In 1978, an initial series of nude strip-tease dancers brought her recognition. Subsequently, she also created portraits of personalities and actresses for numerous magazines in France, Europe, and New York, and directed advertising films. She was awarded the Grand Prix of Photography by the City of Paris in 1994.
2010 Shanghai World Expo: Bettina Rheims's sophisticated and minimalist vision, along with Serge Bramly's lively and wandering pen, capture and narrate the extreme eastern metropolis.

Shanghai, like New York in the 1960s, fascinated: a forest of skyscrapers, unparalleled dynamism and creativity—a new world. But Shanghai is also the surprising fusion of millennia-old traditions and relentless modernity—a world unto itself. Bettina Rheims's sophisticated and streamlined vision, along with Serge Bramly's lively and wandering pen, capture and tell the story of this extreme-orient metropolis. Bettina Rheims visits Shanghai by capturing bodies or faces of women from all backgrounds and universes: dancers, abbesses, walkers, high school students, neighborhood watchwomen, actresses, and more. Her photographs, all posed and staged, convey an almost eternal intimacy, while Serge Bramly’s text recounts moments, discoveries, scenes, or portraits. The contrast between these two visions—dynamic and still, immersive and external—is a beautiful expression of Shanghai’s mystery and energy. With a plush cover, this book, conceived by Bettina Rheims, is in itself a luxurious invitation to travel. A perfect setting for refined and subtle photographs, like the beauty of Shanghai.

About a hundred photographs of Chinese women, as naked as they are dressed up, proving that while it is true that when Deng Xiaoping came to power, lipstick tubes were banned from handbags, there is certainly a lot of new things happening in the East!