Robert Polidori’s atmospheric photographs of interiors altered by the passage of time and the people who have lived in them are investigations into the psychological implications of the human habitat. He has shot all over the world: decaying mansions in the formerly splendid metropolis of Havana, the colonial architecture of Goa, India; Beirut’s courtyards bearing traces of armed conflict; the devastation after the Chernobyl disaster; and urban dwellings in China and Dubai among other countries. In 2006, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York commissioned him to photograph New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. The resulting solo exhibition at the museum, Katrina After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori, was widely acclaimed.
Polidori’s career as a fine-art photographer began in the early 1980s when he gained permission to document the restoration of the Palace of Versailles. Since then, he has returned to the palace several times to take more photographs, and in each one, his conception of rooms as metaphors and vessels of memory is evident. He produces these interior images by means of a single long exposure in natural light. The tonally rich and seductive photographs are the product of a view camera, long hours waiting for the right light, and careful contemplation of the camera angle. Polidori uses large-format sheet film, which he believes produces superior images to digital photography.
Robert Polidori won the World Press Award in 1998 and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000. He has published eleven books and his work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
Five iconic photographers will exhibit their most memorable works at the Ayala Museum.
Sundaram Tagore Gallery has been named one of the top galleries in the world by Blouin Artinfo and Modern Painters magazine.
While packing the usual stars, including Cartier-Bresson, Burtynsky, Hirst, Liebovitz and Polidori, the show tries also to speak to the Southeast Asian region via an ambitious sound installation by the American Taylor Kuffner.
For decades Singapore has concentrated on developing its reputation as a global financial center, a focus that only recently expanded to include its cultural growth as well.
Gallerist Sundaram Tagore goes behind the camera for his first feature film.
For centuries India has held a grip on the Western imagination. Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s exhibition at this year’s India Art Fair in New Delhi (January 26 to 29) traces the country’s influence on a group of notable photographers.
Award-winning photographer Robert Polidori recently showed his powerful images of the interiors of rooms as altered by the passages of time in Hong Kong for the first time.
Sundaram Tagore Gallery has supported Fine Art Asia since the fair started in 2006. It has branches in Hong Kong, New York and Beverley Hills. The gallery specialises in artwork that interweaves the modern, the cultural and the abstract.
Robert Polidori takes extraordinarily beautiful photographs of interiors that are not, nessarily, beautiful. His images aren't about architecture - what he's interested in is how people take buildings and transform them into habitats.
Internationally renowned for his large-scale photography of ruins and deserted spaces, Robert Polidori likes to recall his defining influence: Frances Yates' The Art of memory, which he came across in 1971.
Why wouldn’t the walls have recorded and layered, one on top of the other, all the emotional vibes of the rooms’ successive occupants and visitors? That is the question that has obsessed photographer Robert Polidori for over twenty years, and that makes his photographs of interiors and exteriors so moving and haunting, long after we have seen them.
Established in 2000 in New York and with branches in Beverly Hills and Hong Kong, Sundaram Tagore Gallery was the first international gallery to open in Hong Kong.
Canadian-born photographer Robert Polidori hasn’t taken a vacation in 25 years. He’s been too busy carting his large-format camera around the world to document the aftermath of events like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Hurricane Katrina and the Lebanese Civil War.
At the time, Mr. Tagore was one of the first international gallery owners to open a space in the city. Since then several foreign galleries have followed, including Gagosian Gallery and Ben Brown Fine Arts. “Hong Kong has become an important artistic center,” said Mr. Tagore. “There is an audience here that has a voracious appetite for art.”
Why wouldn’t the walls have recorded and layered, one on top of the other, all the emotional vibes of the rooms’ successive occupants and visitors? That is the question that has obsessed photographer Robert Polidori for over twenty years, and that makes his photographs of interiors and exteriors so moving and haunting, long after we have seen them.
Robert Polidori, the token photographer among the savants, insisted that photography was set by physics.
After the great success of the world premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Polidori brings to Venice the touching and paradoxical allure of the devastation left behind in New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina.
Robert Polidori's haunting photographs if interiors and buildings reveal the everyday lives left behind in Chernobyl, Havana, New Orleans, and Versailles by Hilarie M. Sheets.
I met Robert Polidori through a photograph he had taken of the Versailles restoration. It captivated me. Seeing so many layers of history in one image was astonishing. So was being spurred to imagine Versailles as a real dwelling defined by the remnants of its inhabitants, and all the changes in history they and it had undergone.
The show concerns the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s ruinous pass over New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as recorded by the distinguished architectural photographer Robert Polidori in four visits between September 2005 and April 2006; it is being attended, to judge from the day this viewer was present, by more youthful African-Americans than usually make their way into the Met.
Robert Polidori’s astonishing After the Flood at Flowers East is one of the finest sustained series of photographs for years and that very rare thing, a set of pictures in which intellectual doubt and graphical certainty combine to something approaching perfection.
After Hurricane Katrina, Robert Polidori went to New Orleans, where he lived years ago, to shoot photographs of the devastation for The New Yorker. He stayed longer than first planned, then went back again and again, for weeks, taking hundreds of pictures with a large-format camera that produced wide, superbly detailed color photographs.
Make that two ex-Montrealers. One is Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the
eighth son of a French Canadian pioneer who founded New Orleans in 1718.
The other is Robert Polidori, the New Yorker staff photographer born in Montreal
in 1951, who rushed to the city a year ago this month after Hurricane Katrina
forced half a million people to flee their homes. Le Moyne made plans for a
great city. Polidori gives witness to its demise.
To commemorate the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, ARTINFO has brought back our AI Interview with photographer Robert Polidori, first published in Sept. 2006, on the eve of the opening of his exhibition "New Orleans after the Flood" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This image is among the large-format chromogenic prints mounted on Plexiglas that were part of Robert Polidori's recent exhibition, and among the many published in a new volume, Zones of Exclusion, Pripyat and Chernobyl (Gottingen, Germany, Steidl, 2003).
