Au coeur des sables libyens, les cités perdues de l'Empire romain telles que Cyrène, Apollonia, Lepcis Magna ou encore Oea (Tripoli) sont extraordinairement bien conservées.Elles revivent à travers ce reportage photographique exceptionnel qu'accompagne un texte passionnant écrit par les plus grands spécialistes du sujet. Rarement images plus inoubliables de ces sites de toute beauté ont été proposées au grand public...
New Yorker photographer Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina to record the destruction. His photos documenting the paradoxically beautiful wreckage are mementos for those who could not return-mapping their lives through the remains of their belongings and their homes.
Parcours Muséologique Revisité is Robert Polidori’s attempt to visually portray aspects of historical revisionism as seen through various stages of the restoration of the Palace of Versailles. What does it really mean to restore a room? Is it about the precise duplication of something which is now showing the wear and tear of its age, to renew it and make it again as it once was? Or does it involve entirely redefining the room’s epidermis to a completely different state, a state that it may once have had in an earlier epoch? The curatorial decisions that control this process reflect a political will and esthetic tastes which have altered over the period of the restoration. Photographed over a period of 25 years, the transient and temporary situations which the labors of these restorations afford, present temporal paradoxes that engage layers of history and power.
Robert Polidori is known for his large format photographs of habitats and rooms saturated with the traces of human intervention. In Eye and I , he turns the lens around to reveal the portraits of people he has encountered in his work of more than years photographing around the world, particularly in the Middle East and India. These instantaneous portraits of mutual recognition reveal the photographed subject and the photographer intersecting with each other in a fleeting moment of mutual regard.
Featuring a profile of the photographer Robert Polidori, this title is a collection of his architectural photographs.
This book for the first time assembles images from Polidori's major photographic series Beirut, Versailles, Havanna, New Orleans and Pripyat and Chernobyl, giving an overall impression of his oeuvre. Each of the series constitutes an experimental entity whose goal is to reveal something that no longer exists. They reflect a particular world of memory, the relation between present and past, and delve deep into subjects of profound historical significance. Juxtaposing human suffering, destruction and the magnificence born of man's imagination, these many-layered images provoke highly emotional reactions. In his soundings of reality, the artist creates a theatre of absence, of commemoration. Robert Polidori was born in Montréal in 1951 and lives in New York City. His work has been shown in Paris, Brasilia, New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, among other places. A staff photographer of The New Yorker, Polidori has received numerous honors, including a World Press Award for his coverage of the building of the Getty Museum and two Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for his work in Havana and Brasilia. His bestselling books Havana, Zones of Exclusion - Pripyat and Chernobyl, After the Flood and Parcours Muséologique Revisité are published by Steidl.
Not only is he one of the world's preeminent architecture photographers, Robert Polidori is also--as his popular book Havana proved--a master of urban portraiture. The Montreal-born photographer has made haunting studies of bombed-out buildings in Beirut, decaying New York tenements, Versailles rooms in dusty disarray, Brasilia's paean to spare '50s modernism, and, most recently, the abandoned, contaminated cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Taken together, they add to his ongoing project: the interpretation of the interrupted urban landscape. This new monograph combines the eye of a celebrated photographer with the distinctive voice of an artist and adventurer. Each breathtaking image--meticulously selected by the photographer from his own personal archive--is accompanied by a compelling first person account, based on interviews conducted by Martin C. Pedersen, executive editor of Metropolis magazine. Polidori tells behind-the-scene stories about the making of his photographs, takes us to war-torn Beirut and Brasilia and other world capitals, talks about what makes a building photogenic, how he shoots buildings he doesn't like, his favorite architects, and his love of mosques. A look at the world's great cities as seen through the eyes of a sharp social observer--and a great photographer. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Robert Polidori has been making books at Steidl for over 18 years now, and for many of his visits he lodged in an apartment adjacent to the publishing house. To the left of this, at Düstere Straße 6, stands a small humble house, not only the oldest dwelling in Göttingen but, dating back to 1310, one of the oldest half-timber houses in all of Germany. Miraculously never demolished over the centuries (just altered, repaired and patched up), it has now been restored by Gerhard Steidl and today houses the Günter Grass Archive, part of the University of Göttingen. Topographical Histories presents Polidori’s 2016 photos of the interior walls of the building, whose glorious crumbling layers—fourteenth-century structures of wattle and daub, clay bricks and plaster, and remnants of paint and wallpaper from different centuries—bear witness to living history. Polidori focuses on the subtle colorations and depth and complexity of these surfaces, creating an unconventional, painterly architectural portrait.
This book presents 35 photos of the Getty Center taken shortly before the 1997 opening of its new multipurpose complex designed by Richard Maier. Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the center, the book reveals behind-the-scenes views of the building as objects from J. Paul Getty’s painting, sculpture and decorative arts collections were being installed inside it. In September 1997 The New Yorker commissioned Robert Polidori to photograph Maier’s building. Within 48 hours he had made images of its exterior but remembers being unsatisfied: “The building looks great, but it could house anything really—a hospital, a university, or even some corporate headquarters.” Polidori wanted to document the museum’s interior, to capture what he calls “some sort of museological typology,” and proceeded to photograph the rooms in which artworks were either freshly installed or still being so—sculptures under plastic sheets, golden candelabras resting on foam cushions, cardboard boxes containing unseen treasures. The resulting photos show the museum in the process of taking shape, expose the mechanics of curatorship, and reveal, in Polidori’s words, a paradox: “The more a room may be filled with the helter-skelter of objects to be arranged, the more naked and raw the possibilities and intent of their placement become apparent.”