The construction and representation of femininity has become a sort of obsession for the Parisian photographer Bettina Rheims, who has, since the 1990s, shot luxurious promotional photographs of cinema’s most alluring stars. Rheims’s calculated portraits of women push the idea of perfection, glamour and beauty to the limit: this epic picture of Monica Bellucci, shot in November 1995 in Paris—at the peak of Bellucci’s fame—revels in self-possessed sexiness, but it also prods at the absurdity of our consumption of female beauty, and the construction of stereotype; Bellucci is dressed in red leather, eating spaghetti with ketchup for breakfast. The image is part of a new exhibition of old works by Rheims at Gallery Xippas.
