Akke Alma, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1995

Designed as diptychs, these eight portraits of women are doubly oppositional. They compare two sides of the same model by contrasting head shots and full-length portraits, black and white and colour, private and professional settings with or without artifice.

The gap is all the greater as all these women work as nightclub dancers in Las Vegas. Wearing make-up and scantily clad in flamboyant costumes, they seem to have undergone a metamorphosis that makes them hard to recognize. True to Annie Leibovitz's aesthetic, sociological and feminist perspective, these pairs in the Women series (1995-1996) recall the deceptive play of appearances, even in photography.

These four photographic diptychs will be presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection during the “Au-delà de la couleur” ("Beyond Colour") show at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes in June 2021.