KNOKKE.- Kate Moss, sometimes a rebel, sometimes innocent, Kate is the woman-child or icon of intensified femininity, hyper-natural or maybe ultra-sophisticated.

But Kate always hangs out with the super-famous.

Her innumerable faces have made her one of the most influential figures in the fashion microcosm for twenty-five years.

Unusually and exceptionally beautiful, yet so sculpturesque at the same time, she embodies the perfect fantasy and dream of the last few decades. The strange fascination she arouses is reminiscent of curiosity of the unknown, the unfathomable. Controversial when she began to work, firstly because of her unusual physique then because of her numerous excesses, she has still been one of the most-photographed personalities in the world. This captivating paradoxical creature has been beautified and magnified under the lenses of the most famous photographers. From Rankin to Bettina Rheims and Richard Dumas, not to mention Albert Watson, numerous photographers have tried to freeze her beauty on paper.

Works in her image sent to auction regularly achieve record prices, for example the nude portrait of Kate, painted by Lucian Freud, sold for 3.9 million pounds (7.2 million $) at Christie’s in London in February 2005. More recently the sold-out photograph entitled “Kate Moss, Marrakech” by Albert Watson sold for a record price at Christie’s in New York last April.

The exhibition simply called “Kate” in Knokke this summer inaugurates the new partnership between gallery-owners Maruani-Noirhomme & Young, in a space devoted to photography. This is where the shots taken by the greatest photographers who marked out the model’s career are displayed. Snatches of life, stolen moments, careful staging… an echo of the fascinating multiple facets of the Top Model herself.