Bettina Rheims & Serge Bramly: Rose, C'Est Paris

Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly's Rose, c'est Paris is both a photographic monograph and a feature-length film on DVD. This extraordinary work of art, in two different but interlocking and complimentary formats, defies easy categorization. For in this multi-layered opus of poetic symbolism, photographer Bettina Rheims and artist Serge Bramly evoke the City of Light in a completely novel way: this is a Paris of surrealist visions, confused identities, artistic phantoms, unseen manipulation, obsession, fetish, and seething desire.

Equal parts erotica, fashion shoot, art monograph, metaphysical mystery, social and cultural Archaeology of the French capital, and neo-noir arthouse film—Rose, c'est Paris is all this and more.

In a surrealistic inversion of the oft-imitated 1954 Parisian photobook by Ed van Elsken, Love On The Left Bank, this mesmerising work is the meandering tale of twin sisters, known only as B and R, and a third principal—the city itself. When R returns to their apartment and learns that B has been abducted following a violent struggle, a dreamlike detective story unfolds in black and white on the streets, in the cafés and cabarets, groceries and museums, usines abondonées, and grands hotels of Paris.

But even this notional plot is submerged under layers of echoes, of references and homages to artists like René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Man Ray; to the brilliant amorality of the Fantômas pulp novels of the early 20th century and to various mythical sites and monuments of Paris.

What happened to the missing sister? Was there a plot? Was she really kidnapped? Is she alive or dead? Was it murder? Suicide? Or just a nightmare? Or is she now a punk rocker, a prostitute, a cabaret dancer, or possibly even a nun? Did she marry and flee to India? Does R know more than she claims? Or perhaps B has adopted her sister's identity—and it is in fact R who has gone missing...

Rheims and Bramly create a series of extraordinary tableaux suggesting all these possibilities and many more. Featuring a host of extraordinary figures, notably Naomi Campbell, Michelle Yeoh, Monica Bellucci, Charlotte Rampling, Valérie Lemercier, Inès Sastre, Anna Mouglalis, Audrey Marnay, Anthony Delon, Rona Hartner, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Azzedine Alaïa, Louise Bourgoin and Hélèna Noguerra, to family members, fashion models, porn stars and the beautiful people of Paris, Rose, c'est Paris is immediately accessible as a delicious visual treat, a refreshingly original work of erotica, and a celebration of Paris that sidesteps all the usual clichés. And yet the work remains infinitely mysterious in the way it plays with genre and narrative, allusion and expectation. Like the city itself, it can never be fully defined or explained, only experienced again and again.

*Available in a XL-format Collector's Edition of 1,500 copies, each numbered and signed by Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly. Also available in two Art Editions of 100 copies each, with a signed and numbered original print.