Bettina Rheims Exhibition is a Japanese-language catalogue published by Pacific Press Services in 1997, issued around the photographer’s exhibition in Tokyo and Osaka. It is not a general survey but an exhibition book: its structure follows a specific presentation of Rheims’s work, and the Odakyu Art Museum is named among its contributors, placing the volume within an institutional context rather than presenting it as a free-standing artist’s monograph.
The subject is portraiture. Catalogue records identify portrait photography, women, and exhibitions among its themes, and the book gathers images made for, or shown within, that retrospective frame. Rheims’s portraits are the core of the material; the Japanese edition gives the work a particular readership and a particular context. The result is a document of how the exhibition was constituted for its Japanese audience, not simply a portfolio of plates.
What distinguishes it is the conjunction of photographer, exhibition, and place. The catalogue records a traveling retrospective at a fixed moment, and it preserves the exhibition as a published object, with the venue’s name attached. The Japanese edition, the two-city exhibition, and the Pacific Press Services imprint together give the book a documentary specificity that a generic portrait collection would lack.
For a collector, the appeal is documentary rather than speculative. This is a 1990s Japanese exhibition catalogue with a named publisher and a clear exhibition provenance; those facts, rather than claims about scarcity, are what make it useful. It sits at the intersection of Rheims’s portrait practice and the history of exhibition publishing in Japan, and it rewards attention as a specific, situated artefact.
