Robert Polidori Book order

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.”

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 is Robert Poldori’s portrait of the interiors of the now demolished Hotel Petra in Beirut, a grand icon of the city’s pre-warhistory. The Hotel Petra was once one of the most popular hotels in Beirut, conveniently located in the city center adjacent to theGrand Theatre. After the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, Rafi q al-Haririfounded a holding company, Solidere, whose goal was the selective demolition and reconstruction of downtown Beirut’s urban fabric. In 1992 the Hotel Petra was set aside for later restoration, and from that moment essentially cut off from any human intervention. Polidori gained access to this site in 2010, almost twenty years after its mothballing, and was transfi xed by what he discovered: “It’s truly rare to fi nd examples of such undisturbed decomposition,” heexplains. “Usually the normal wear and tear of human traffi c would violate and destroy the surfaces of such a delicate ecosystem of layered paint. I came to view these walls as a living process of slow decay whose end effect closely resembled the concerns of many contemporary abstract painters … only in this case their genesis was not fixed or intentional, but the gradual summation of several painters and workmen modifying the wall surfaces at different points in timefor a range of reasons. I was quite taken by their beauty and wasmoved to photograph them for posterity.”

In his new book, Robert Polidori presents us with a single large-format photograph of a city block in an improvised, auto-constructed settlement in Mumbai, India. In an almost seamless déroulement that appears to expand like an accordion or folding-screen, the photograph is composed of multiple images imperceptibly overlaid and welded together in a complex process to form a panoramic view. Applying remote sensing techniques that are normally used in space cartography and street photography, Polidori ventures a photographic attempt to come to terms with the phenomena of adjacencies, observing and beholding what is next to what. In this way he minutely scans the urban landscape, recording the precarious and temporary nature of the provisional and yet psychologically rich and in fact highly individualized dwellings.

Beirut. Tripoli. Havana. Chernobyl. New Orleans. Rio. Amman. Versailles. Over the course of thirty years, Robert Polidori has travelled the world photographing places with names so familiar we feel we know them already. On the occasion of his first museum retrospective in the United States, the artist has selected more than one hundred photographs for this volume that challenge our preconceptions, mining both the accoutrement and the psychology of space for what they tell us—and for what they withhold—about history, memory, identity, and time. The catalogue to this exhibition is now published as a book.

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.

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.

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.

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.