Robert Polidori Selected Press Pa Ul Kasmin Gallery

ROBERT POLIDORI SELECTED PRESS PA UL KASMIN GALLERY

Mesmerising Photographs of Frescoes in a Florentine Monastery

Architectural photographer Robert Polidori turns his lens to the paintings of Fra Angelico in Florence – to beguiling effect

Daisy Woodward March 19, 2018

The Mocking of Christ by Fra Angelico, Cell 7, Museum of San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy, 2010© Robert Polidori, Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Canadian-American photographer Robert Polidori has devoted much of his esteemed career to exploring the effects of time, nature and human intervention on buildings and landscapes. His works are both poetic and melancholy, his treatment of spaces reverent. He views rooms as “memory theatres”, and deftly employs his medium to elevate their status to that of precious relics, regardless of their current condition. His previous projects have spanned devastated New Orleans homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, through to the crumbling buildings of Havana, majestic in their faded splendour. Earlier this month, a 2010 series of Polidori’s photographs depicting the interior of the Convento di San Marco in Florence went on display at Paul Kasmin

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Gallery in New York, allowing audiences the chance to enjoy the full power of the image-maker’s large-scale works in person. The Dominican-monastery-turned-museum invited Polidori to lens the celebrated frescoes of Renaissance painter and Dominican monk Fra Angelico which adorn many of its walls. Considered some of the most important paintings of the early Renaissance, these mesmeric, pastel-hued works, including the painter’s iconic depiction of The Annunciation, were designed not merely as story-telling devices, as was the purpose of paintings in the previous Byzantine period, but as tools for reflection. They depict the life of Christ with striking realism: the figures are fleshed out with flowing robes and realistic features, while architectural spaces are rendered in impressive perspective. For the monks living in the convent, they served as daily reminders of Christ’s mortal suffering and the universal condition of mankind. In his capturing of the frescoes, Polidori has explored their harmonious integration with the spaces they fill, while masterfully enhancing their beauty. The arch-like framing of The Mocking of Christ, for instance, is pleasingly mirrored by the shape of the doorway to its right, while the Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saints is lensed through a roundel in the wall of the adjoining room – a clever use of architectural detailing to enhance the painting’s visibility, which also makes for a particularly pleasing photograph. A sense of meditative calm pervades the series, an apt encapsulation of both the works’ intended function and Polidori’s unique ability to capture the essence of spaces and the history they’ve born witness to. Happy (zen) Monday!

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Snapshot: ‘Fra Angelico/Opus Operantis’ by Robert Polidori The photographer’s work shows how the echoes of history resonate in architecture Kitty Grady MARCH 16, 2018

'The Capture of Christ by Fra Angelico, Cell 33, Museum of San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy' (2010) © Robert Polidori/Paul Kasmin Gallery Born in 1951, the Canadian-American photographer Robert Polidori is known for his large-scale colour images of architecture, urban environments and interior spaces. For a 2010 series, he was invited to photograph the frescoes of Italian Renaissance painter and Dominican friar Fra Angelico (1395-1455) that decorate the dormitories in the Convento di San Marco in Florence. Commissioned by Cosimo de Medici, the devotional works — depicting scenes from the life of Christ — were made to enhance meditation and prayer. Polidori’s photographs show how the echoes of history resonate in architecture. His contemplative images also illuminate how interior spaces act as boundless containers for memory and emotion.

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'The Mocking of Christ by Fra Angelico, Cell 7, Museum of San, Marco Convent, Florence, Italy' (2010) © Robert Polidori/Paul Kasmin

'Adoration of the Magi and Man of Sorrows by Fra Angelico, Cell 39, Museum of San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy' (2010) © Robert Polidori/Paul Kasmin

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'Crucifixion with Longinus by Fra Angelico, Museum of San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy' (2010) © Robert Polidori/Paul Kasmin

'Crucifixion with the Virgin and Sts Cosmas, John the Evangelist and Peter Martyr by Fra Angelico' (2010) © Robert Polidori/Paul Kasmin Gallery

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'Crucifixion with Saint Dominic prostrate on the floor, by Fra Angelico, Museum of San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy' (2010) © Robert Polidori/Paul Kasmin

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Getty Center celebrates 20th anniversary with Robert Polidori photographs exhibition

2017

Robert Polidori (Canadian / French / American, born 1951), European Painting 1850-1900 Gallery, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997. Chromogenic print. Image: 41.6 × 54.6 cm (16 3/8 × 21 1/2 in.) Sheet: 47.6 × 60.3 cm (18 3/4 × 23 3/4 in.) Accession No. EX.2017.11.21 © Robert Polidori Object Credit: Courtesy of the artist in conjunction with The Lapis Press.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Getty Center, the J. Paul Getty Museum opens an exhibition of 20 works by renowned photographer Robert Polidori (Canadian-French-American, born 1951). Robert Polidori: 20 Photographs of the Getty Museum, 1997 is the first public exhibition of photographs showing the first installation of the Getty Center in the month leading up to its opening in December 1997.

“As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Getty Center this December, this exhibition provides an opportunity to reflect upon the creation of this remarkable complex of buildings and the evolution of the Getty Center’s programs. Polidori’s artfully composed images are not only an important historical record, but also a revealing insight into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the preparation and installation of our exhibitions and displays,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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Highly regarded for his depictions of human habitats and cultural museology, Polidori produced these intimate and unstaged views of the Getty Center in fall 1997 while on assignment for The New Yorker. Initially limited to surveying the exterior grounds because of restricted access, he lobbied successfully for permission to photograph the Center’s indoor spaces as well. Polidori ultimately produced about 60 exposures of the gardens, entrance hall, galleries, and various spaces across the site. Working in what he called an “old analogical way” with a large-format camera and Kodak Vericolor film, Polidori created this group of photographs at a moment when digital photography was gaining momentum, embraced by amateur and professional photographers alike.

This exhibition features a selection of photographs Polidori made of interior spaces within the Getty Museum, work he generated while in the midst of a multi- year project to document period rooms undergoing restoration at the Palace of Versailles. Many of the images reveal the process of installing objects from J. Paul Getty’s painting, sculpture, and decorative arts collections in the new galleries, some of which remain on display today. A book titled Synchrony and Diachrony, published by Steidl and featuring texts by Polidori, David Dorenbaum (psychoanalyst and assistant professor at the University of Toronto), and Amanda Maddox (associate curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum), will be released on the occasion of the exhibition.

"The labors made semi-evident in these photographs—showing brief glimpses of seemingly chaotic states, slowly evolving towards a structured order, resembling tableaus and portraying scenes seen as occurring behind a curtain—were attempts on my part to bring some phenomenological trace, as well as psychological depth, to a subject matter that essentially is usually invisible: the portraiture of the curatorial act,” says Robert Polidori.

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Robert Polidori explores ‘auto-constructed’ cities in his first show at Paul Kasmin Gallery September 21, 2016

Gritty, urban photographs envelop the viewer at photographer Robert Polidori’s inaugural show at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City. Pictured: Dharavi #1, Mumbai

In photographer Robert Polidori’s inaugural show at the Paul Kasmin Gallery – entitled 'Ecophilia / Chronostasis' – gritty, urban photographs completely envelop the viewer, blocking the surrounding trendy Chelsea neighborhood. Polidori uses ‘dendritic’ to describe the industrial sprawl captured in this series – a term that more commonly refers to the branching extensions of a biological structure such as a cell or a tree.

This is the first time Polidori’s 2007 ‘dendritic’ series is being shown in the United States. In it, the photographer, known for capturing post-disaster scenes in Chernobyl, New Orleans and Havana, turns his lens on Amman, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. ‘These "auto constructed" cities are constructed (as the term implies) by the inhabitants themselves,’ Polidori says. ‘I began the series in 1996 when I chanced upon the auto-constructed settlements in Jabal al Qal'a [Amman Citadel]. This whole settlement was constructed within three years by Palestinians expulsed from Kuwait in 1991 and I was amazed by the vast and rapid expansion of this new "organic" urban growth.’

Three enormous photographs of India dominate the space, especially his 12m work, 60 Feet Road which captures an eponymous street in Mumbai. The image is a compilation of 22 separate photographs stitched into one. ‘I wanted the piece to be large enough for the viewer to see the myriad details inherent in the image and wide enough to force the viewer to walk by it from end to end as I had to do when I initially photographed it,’ Polidori explains.

Also on view is the photographer’s 2010 Hotel Petra, a set of images taken of a formerly grand hotel that was nearly destroyed and abandoned in Beirut during the 1980s civil war. Unlike his expansive city photographs, Hotel Petra focuses on specific details of flaked paint and mottled walls, offering up a more poetic perspective of architectural decline. Combined, the two series continue Polidori’s exploration of the boundaries between beauty and decay, order and disorder, and the architectural record that encapsulates all of these conditions. Editor’s Pick: Robert Polidori Stitches Together Photos of City Life September 20, 2016

At Paul Kasmin Gallery, the renowned photographer shows artful panoramas of Mumbai's sprawling outskirts and the ruins of a Beirut luxury hotel.

Robert Polidori has captured both luxury and wreckage in his photographs. His new show at Paul Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan features images of the ruins of a once-glamorous hotel in Beirut and of Mumbai neighborhoods (portrait by Peter Keyser).

Throughout his career, the Montreal-born photographer Robert Polidori has been known for creating resonant images of empty, often decrepit rooms that still seem to pulse with the life of the people and events who have just passed through them. He has photographed an abandoned control room in Chernobyl, snipers’ lairs in Beirut, the picturesquely decaying Havana home of an erstwhile plutocrat and the restoration and continued maintenance of the palace of Versailles.

“The pictures succeed because, in part, Polidori eschewed nostalgia for something far more complex — the poignancy of absence,” Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator of photography at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in an essay about the photographer’s images of the wreckage left in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, which the museum exhibited in 2006. (Rosenheim’s words come from an essay in Polidori’s book After the Flood, published that same year by Steidl.) Like most of Polidori’s work, these pictures were taken with a large-format camera using only natural light. As Rosenheim observes, “One source of our lasting attraction to these merciless domestic landscapes is the certain knowledge that they will soon be gone forever.” The “Hotel Petra” series documents the ruins of the hotel, which was severely damaged during Lebanon’s civil war and abandoned for 20 years. This image is Hotel Petra #10, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010.

Polidori’s first show at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery (running through October 15) reveals a somewhat different side of his work. It includes seven images from his 2010 “Hotel Petra” series, shot in the once- glamorous Beirut property, which was badly damaged in the 1975–90 civil war and left to decay for 20 years. In contrast to the rooms and houses depicted in Polidori’s previous work, these ruins are often photographed in such extreme close-up that his pictures suggest richly hued oil abstractions.

The show is also the U.S. debut of Polidori’s photographs of so-called “dendritic” cities — those whose neighborhoods have developed organically, built by their inhabitants — represented here by Mumbai. These images, made between 2008 and ’11, capture entire neighborhoods using a technique that involves stitching together 8-by-10 and 11-by-14-inch photographs, each filled with houses and people, to form a single panoramic view. For example, 60 Feet Road, a tour de force named for a two-mile-long street of which Polidori shows a single block, is composed of 22 seamlessly connected images. Walking along the 40-foot length of the piece produces the odd sensation that you’re strolling down the street itself, peering straight into the lives of its residents. Amrut Nagar #3, Mumbai, India, 2011, is another example of a panorama created by piecing together multiple images comprising a scene.

With this exhibition, Polidori has returned to a contemporary art gallery. “Robert is using some very pioneering techniques and procedures,” says Mariska Nietzman, a director at Kasmin, “and he wanted the work to be seen beyond the confines of a photography gallery.” Polidori’s pictures tread the boundary between fine art and documentary photography, with the dendritic pictures — now printed on canvas — suggesting paintings and the pigment print “Hotel Petra” series reminiscent of gouache or pastel.

Polidori, who is 65 and lives in Ojai, California, shared his recollections of his career with Introspective during a recent visit to New York before the show opened. Here are edited excerpts:

Polidori began by speaking of his beginnings as a filmmaker. A native of Canada, he studied at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the 1970s, when the school was known for its avant-garde filmmaking program. In the 1980s, he worked as an assistant to Jonas Mekas at Anthology Film Archives, in New York City, before becoming a still photographer. Polidori shoots most of his work, including his “dendritic” cities series, with a large-format camera and color film, using only natural light. Photo by Dinesh Madhavan.

“People always ask, ‘How did you get into photography?’ Through Frances Yates, and her book The Art of Memory, which had a profound impact on me. It traces the history of mnemonic systems, from ancient Greece to the early seventeenth century. I had always thought the natural application of the camera was to serve history — that was its utilitarian function. But one of the things mentioned in The Art of Memory was that students of memory would study empty rooms, a concept the Romans called locus. In the cinema, whenever you saw rooms, the camera jittered and seemed nervous. Whereas in photographs, it was at repose. I followed that.”

Polidori then recalled the first rooms he photographed, in the mid-1980s: three Lower East Side apartments whose residents had died within two weeks of each other.

“When I take photographs of empty rooms, they’re actually portraits of their inhabitants. What I’m capturing with Versailles is more of what I’d call a “collective superego” thing, like putting makeup on yourself. I also want to extract a structure from the subject itself. Where did I get that idea? Structural filmmaking. My favorite artist is Michael Snow, and my favorite film is Wavelength.” The damage sustained by the hotel during Beirut’s 1975–90 civil war and its neglect in the years since are readily apparent in Hotel Petra #6, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010.

That 1967 work, a classic of experimental cinema, spends nearly 45 minutes documenting the passage of time in a single room before zooming in on a photograph on the wall that depicts waves in the ocean.

Polidori said that he happened upon his first dendritic city in 1996. It was an extension of Amman, Jordan, built on a hillside and full of new structures but with no real roads, which he learned had been developed by Palestinians expelled from Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Although he realized fairly quickly that such cities exist worldwide, from Rio de Janeiro to Mumbai, he spent nearly 10 years perfecting the technique and tools for photographing and printing the images.

“It took me a long time to figure out how to make this work, because from the computer-stitching point, it’s complicated. But it forced itself into my consciousness. The resulting pictures are like the smallest cinematic tracking shots. Why do I do it this way? Because I don’t see the advantage of going against the laws of perspective and the Renaissance, just like I don’t see the advantage of going against conventional grammar. My work has gone from interiors to exteriors and the collective process of habitat.

“I didn’t do these pictures to glorify these people’s poverty. It’s true these people are poor, but I find them highly creative. Auto-constructed cities are cities that are built by their own inhabitants. In my work, I’m looking at organic nesting phenomena and human ingenuity.” PA UL KASMIN GALLERY

Gallery Hopping: Robert Polidori’s Monumental Urban Photos at Paul Kasmin

Large-scale photographs depict beautiful ruins.

Eileen Kinsella

September 19, 2016

Robert Polidori, Hotel Petra #6, Beirut, Lebanon (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Photographer Robert Polidori‘s debut show at Paul Kasmin Gallery also marks the first time that his “Dendritic Cities,” a body of work begun in 2007, is being shown in the US.

The term “dendritic” is taken from the branching extensions of a cell structure, and is used to describe cities that are “auto-constructed” as a result of industrialism (as oppposed to pre-planned), in places such as Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Amman, Jordan.

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The show features three large-scale photographs taken in India, including 60 Feet Road, in which 22 photographs are combined into one work that spans nearly the entire length of a gallery wall. Amrut Nagar comprises four separate panels which provide a view of a heavily populated mountainside in the Mumbai suburb taken from a single vantage point.

In the back section of the gallery hangs a selection of equally compelling images from Polidori’s 2010 series “Hotel Petra,” in which he explored the ruined interior of an abandoned hotel in Lebanon. Once a grand luxury hotel, Petra was damaged during the civil war in the 1980s and sat abandoned for two decades. The photos of Petra “reveal a building quietly succumbing to natural forms of decay… countless layers of paint have flaked and faded away,” according to a statement from the gallery.

Anyone who was mesmerized by Polidori’s haunting 2006 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “New Orleans After the Flood,” documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, will find this compelling as well.

Despite the complicated sounding show title at Kasmin (“Ecophilia/Chronostasis”) and the in-depth explanation that accompanies “Dendritic Cities,” these are some of the most simple and striking images you’ll see this week.

293 & 297 TENTH AVENUE 515 WEST 27TH STREET TELEPHONE 212 563 4474 NEW YORK, NY 10001 PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM Edward Burtynsky and Robert Polidori’s Shared Visions September 12, 2016

In a world distracted by small-screen snapshots and selfies, two eminent photographers are proving that large-scale environmental images are not only relevant but also vital

Robert Polidori’s Amrut Ngar #3 (2011), shot in Mumbai, India © ROBERT POLIDORI, COURTESY OF PAUL KASMIN GALLERY, NEW YORK.

STARTING IN THE 1990S, advances in digital technology made it easier for photographers to print their work at previously unimaginable sizes. The result was a golden age of vast pictures—typified by the work of artists such as Andreas Gursky—with the kind of impact previously limited to painting or films. But in these social-media–saturated times, when we’re constantly thumbing through palm-size images shared freely on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, is there still a meaningful place for photographs measured in feet?

For Edward Burtynsky and Robert Polidori, two of today’s most esteemed practitioners of large- scale photography, the answer is unequivocally yes. And this fall they are both offering fresh reminders of their art’s visual power and relevance with gallery shows and new books. Both Canadian-born, these two artists have spent the past three decades working on loosely parallel tracks, each bringing a sharp aesthetic eye to documentary images that thoughtfully address issues of historical, socioeconomic and ecological consequence. Technically ambitious and often shot in far-flung, challenging locales, their photographs provide perspectives rarely seen. Seductive yet unnerving, they act like mirrors, revealing things about who we are and what we’re becoming.

In a way, Edward Burtynsky’s artistic path is the result of a wrong turn. Driving through Pennsylvania in the early ’80s, he wound up in the tiny coal-mining town of Frackville, where he suddenly found himself in a surreal landscape stripped of all traces of nature. He knew then that he’d discovered his mission. “We’re an expanding population that’s bearing down on the resources of the planet,” says the photographer, who has since traversed the globe shooting mines and quarries, oil fields and factories, waterways and farmlands. His bird’s-eye views, often captured from planes, helicopters and, more recently, drones, take an unsparing look at the relationship between humans and nature.

Today, Burtynsky oversees a busy Toronto studio, where a small team coordinates logistics for his complex shoots, performs postproduction work and communicates with museums and his 11 galleries around the world. His first new body of work in four years, a group of photographs of Indian salt farms, is being unveiled this fall by galleries in three cities: Flowers in London (through October 29), Nicholas Metivier in Toronto (September 29–October 22) and both Howard Greenberg (November 4–December 31) and Bryce Wolkowitz (November 3–December 23) in New York. Also on display will be a selection of photographs from the forthcoming book Essential Elements (Thames & Hudson), a survey of Burtynsky’s career that pairs familiar images with pictures from his lesser-known series.

To capture the salt works, Burtynsky traveled to the Indian state of Gujarat, to an area near the Arabian Sea known as the Little Rann of Kutch. Here more than 100,000 laborers work in a 400- year-old salt-harvesting industry now under threat from a receding water table and unfavorable market forces. Using his 60-megapixel Hasselblad camera, Burtynsky shot from both a helicopter and a Cessna at altitudes between 300 and 4,000 feet. The resulting images (Steidl is publishing a book of them this month) are captivating studies in pattern and color variations. While the salt pans differ in size, shape and configuration, the palette ranges from gray, brown and white to ochre, pink and pale blues and greens.

Getting up close to a Burtynsky photograph, the largest of which measure nearly five by seven feet, is a visceral encounter. Unable to take in the entire picture at once, your eyes scan the surface as the image almost envelops you. “At that scale, there’s this hovering-over, bodily experience that I like to work with,” says Burtynsky. “You stand in front of it, and there’s an almost dizzying, vertigo-like effect.”

That many of his landscape images, from Spanish dryland farms to New Mexico copper mines to Chinese rice terraces, evoke abstract painting isn’t lost on Burtynsky or his dealers. “He has been coming back to a more abstract visual idea,” says Howard Greenberg, who has co-represented Burtynsky in New York with Bryce Wolkowitz for the past several years. “He’s done that by shooting from even greater heights and eliminating the horizon.”

An important element of Burtynsky’s career has been his eagerness to embrace new mediums and technologies, whether employing drones or experimenting with photogrammetry, a process that uses software to translate two-dimensional images of an object, taken from multiple angles, into a rendering that appears 3-D when viewed with virtual-reality goggles. Currently, Burtynsky’s team is working with some 2,300 images he shot before an ivory burn—the destruction of illegally obtained elephant tusks, meant to curb poaching—in Kenya earlier this year. “The technology isn’t quite there yet,” the photographer says, “but the idea is to have this pile of tusks, which was 20 feet high and 20 feet across, rendered in a way that would allow you to put on a VR headset and experience it at scale by walking around it.” Burtynsky’s aim with all of his work is “to have the viewer spend time with and really consider these worlds,” he says. “I want people to enter them.”

Describing his approach as a photographer, Robert Polidori says he is “basically an impressionist.” The Montreal native, who recently moved his studio to Ojai, California, after three years in Los Angeles, clarifies that by adding, “I’m a medium, not a creator.” Despite his journalistic impulse— he has shot for many publications and was a staff photographer for The New Yorker from 1998 to 2006—Polidori has never been purely a documentarian. His interest has always lain in making “psychological portraits” of architectural spaces, which he sees as vessels for memories and as projections of the people who have lived there.

Robert Polidori using his camera. Photo courtesy Robert Polidori and Paul Kasmin Gallery. The photographer’s best-known series include shots of the Château de Versailles under restoration, crumbling old Havana interiors, New Orleans homes devastated by Hurricane Katrina and deserted sites near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “I picked Chernobyl as a subject because I thought it was historically important, a signal,” the photographer says. “It was a modern-day Pompeii, but it was an event caused not by nature but by man’s irresponsibility.”

This fall Polidori is having his first show with the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. On view through October 15 are several of the evocative photographs Polidori shot inside Beirut’s deserted and crumbling Hotel Petra as well as three monumental works related to his interest in urban slums and favelas, places he refers to as “auto-constructed cities—the sort of wild, self-made, non- sanctioned settlements that come out of an organic need.” Created from pictures he took in Mumbai, India, these technically remarkable works were a decade in the making.

Polidori’s Hotel Petra photographs—the subject of a book Steidl is publishing in December—are reminders of the lasting impact of Lebanon’s long civil war. The once-grand building was badly damaged in that conflict, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, and was left abandoned for many years before eventually being demolished. Polidori’s images, some of which stand six feet high, are ravishing meditations on the concepts of transience and decay, the cracked and peeling walls revealing layers of history.

“His commentary on humans’ relationship with architecture and on the changing world is incredibly compelling,” says Paul Kasmin. “Plus, his working process is quite extraordinary.”

Polidori shoots with a massive view camera with giant bellows, using large-format film, up to 11 by 14 inches, because, he explains, “I love the smoothness and higher resolution of film. Also, I like having something physical that the image is embedded in.” Everything is later scanned into digital form, allowing him to create works such as the centerpiece of his show at Kasmin: a panorama of 60 Feet Road, a street of makeshift dwellings in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Polidori started by photographing one side of the road’s entire length, moving his camera laterally, tracking-shot style, along an adjacent drainage canal. Detailed in its own forthcoming book, also from Steidl, the final work is a composite of 22 different images stitched together in Photoshop and printed on a 40-foot-wide canvas.

It’s not the way our eyes would actually see the place, of course. Shot between 6:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., the 22 images have different light, for one thing. “On one side it’s darker and bluer,” notes Polidori, “and as you move across it gets reddish and golden, and then you’re into shade and then bright sunlight again.” Plus, the perspective is as if we were standing directly in front of each segment simultaneously. “What I’m trying to do is make a more idealized version of what I perceive the subject to be,” he explains.

Part of what draws Polidori to places like 60 Feet Road is a compulsion to document an important aspect of human existence that he feels most serious photographers overlook. “When these places no longer exist, the images will be a record of one face of the industrial age’s end,” he says. “I’ve always felt that this is photography’s great utilitarian function—the witness of time.” Paul Kasmin Gallery to open its inaugural exhibition of acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori September 8, 2016

Hotel Petra #7

NEW YORK, NY.- Paul Kasmin Gallery announces its inaugural exhibition of acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori, on view from September 8 to October 15, 2016 at 515 W. 27th Street.

This exhibition will be the first U.S. show to feature Polidori’s “dendritic cities” images, a body of work begun in 2007. He appropriates the term “dendritic” from the branching extensions of a cell structure and uses it to describe the auto-constructed cities (as opposed to pre-planned urban developments) that have appeared as a result of industrialism in cities around the world, including Amman, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition will feature three monumental photographs taken in India, including an expansive mural of a street in Mumbai known locally as “60 Feet Road.”

Long sensitive to the shared terrain between photography and cartography, Polidori has stepped outside of the traditional photographic “frame” of an image, and instead has adopted an approach where the framing is based upon the subject of the image. As Polidori describes it, “its execution came to demand labors more in line with mapping strategies than traditional photographic compositional framing.” Rather than isolating one particular section or façade of the narrow street, Polidori set out to photograph the entire length of the 60 Feet Road within one long continuous printed photograph. Like a tracking shot within a film, Polidori has compiled 22 separate photographs into one. The sequence of 8x10 color sheet film has been scanned and computer-stitched into a continuous déroulement, like an Asian scroll. Spanning a length of forty feet, viewers can fix their attention on minute details that would otherwise go unnoticed. In “Amrut Nagar,” comprising four separate panels, Polidori photographs a complete 180° view of a populated mountainside from one single vantage point.

Also on show is a selection of photographs from Polidori’s 2010 project in Lebanon, “Hotel Petra.” The photographs explore the interior of a once grand and luxurious hotel in downtown Beirut that was severely damaged during the civil war of the 1980s and left abandoned for 20 years. In contrast to the teeming metropolises in the “dendritic cities,” the photographs of Hotel Petra reveal a building quietly succumbing to natural forms of decay and abandonment: countless layers of paint have flaked and faded away, resulting in a multilayered palette of color and design. This site gives a voice to Polidori’s thesis on modern painting, inasmuch as the compositions of gradually evolving and decaying paint closely resemble the intentional concerns of many modern and contemporary painters; only in this case the genesis of the phenomena was neither fixed nor intentional, but rather the unintentional summation of subsequent labors of various painters and workmen acting and modifying their surfaces at different times over decades, and as such, can be seen as “natural” or “unconscious” collective super-ego documents. This slow deterioration bears witness to the history as “seen” and “lived” by the walls themselves. Polidori captures the poetic quality of the ruin, and in the photographic stillness, the rooms are portrayed as metaphors and vessels for memory.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Steidl will be releasing two new publications: Hotel Petra and 60 Feet Road (Bhatiya Nagar Facades), which focuses entirely on the single photograph of the city block. Texts by the photographer are included in both books.

Robert Polidori (b. 1951) has published over fifteen monographs, most recently Chronophagia and the two volume Rio. These publications follow the three volume Parcours Muséologique Revisité, an extensive compilation of the thirty years he has spent photographing the Château de Versailles. He has received the World Press Award (1998) and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography (1999, 2000). Over the course of his career, he has had several major solo exhibitions, notably a mid-career retrospective at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, “Fotografias” at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro, and “After the Flood” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006, which presented his photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. His work is held in numerous collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. He lives and works in Ojai, California. Alain.R.Truong Paul Kasmin Gallery to open its inaugural exhibition of acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori September 4, 2016

Robert Polidori, Dharavi #1, Mumbai, 2008. Archival UV cured ink on linen canvas.

NEW YORK, NY.- Paul Kasmin Gallery announces its inaugural exhibition of acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori, on view from September 8 to October 15, 2016 at 515 W. 27th Street.

Rather than isolating one particular section or façade of the narrow street, Polidori set out to photograph the entire length of the 60 Feet Road within one long continuous printed photograph. Like a tracking shot within a film, Polidori has compiled 22 separate photographs into one. The sequence of 8x10 color sheet film has been scanned and computer-stitched into a continuous déroulement, like an Asian scroll. Spanning a length of forty feet, viewers can fix their attention on minute details that would otherwise go unnoticed. In “Amrut Nagar,” comprising four separate panels, Polidori photographs a complete 180° view of a populated mountainside from one single vantage point. Robert Polidori, Hotel Petra # 6, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010. Aqueaous Inkjet on Parrot Angelica Universal. Photomatte paper mounted on Dibond.

Robert Polidori, Hotel Petra Wall Detail #1, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010. Epson archival inkjet print mounted to dibond. PA UL KASMIN GALLERY

Robert Polidori: Ecophilia / Chronosasis

Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York

Mira Dayal

8 September – 15 October, 2017

The dirt hills of India are under construction, and like the corrugated metal sheets layered to create local slum walls, Robert Polidori’s images are collaged into veritable murals. Though his method is not explicitly detailed, the resulting works are reminiscent of Andreas Gursky’s in their visual density and reduction of people to texture.

Featured work Amrut Nagar is a 190-degree view of that dirt hillside composed of four prints. The eye relies on visual anchors like trees to understand where on frame merges with the next. In the leftmost print, whilst the hillside collage is nearly seamless, the sky (arguably the simplest element to edit) is left visibly jagged. The sky indexes the creation of the image again in the largest panorama, 60 Feet Road; as the camera progresses along the landscape, the sky darkens.

As is clear from the white background and jagged edges of these images of India, Polidori is interested in surfaces and their representations. In this sense, the artist’s comparison of these photographs to cartography is quite accurate – both are constructed by an outsider for his own purposes and must be reduced to communicate.

Hotel Petra more explicitly flattens history in a series capturing the eponymous structure in Beirut, damaged during the civil war. One image in particular holds the viewer’s gaze: the peeling paint of the hotel wall read as the peeling surface of the print. For the artist, these layers of paint represent “subsequent labors of various painters” – and though his own layer is only a trompe l’oeil painting, Polidori certainly reframes the sociopolitical stakes around image making. https://issuu.com/aesthetica_magazine/docs/aesthetica_magazine_- _issue_73?e=5376688/39207363

293 & 297 TENTH AVENUE TELEPHONE 212 563 4474 515 WEST 27TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10001 PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM 07-08-2016

Memorial Art Gallery to exhibit 'Robert Polidori: Chronophagia' 05-10-16 The Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, 500 University Drive, will exhibit Polidori:“Robert Chronophagia,” a display of works by photojournalist Robert Polidori, May 22 24.through July

The museum will host an opening party for the exhibit from 8 to 11 p.m. May 21. Reservations requireare d. “Chronophagia,” or "the eating of time," features 54 large-scale color photographs by Polidori, whosework examines built environments that have been altered by human or natural intervention, Nesuchw asOrleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Chernobyl as a post-disaster wasteland,Middle East the devasta ted by years of warfare and the Palace of Versailles undergoing an renovation.extended Usually devoid of human subjects, these photographs are saturated with human waitingstories to be told. "Where you point the camera is a question," Polidori said. "The image you get is a kind of Fromanswer." 1998 to 2006, Polidori was staff photographer for The New Yorker magazine. Polidori's work has been exhibited around the world and is in international collections Georgeincluding Eastman the Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museumand the Centre of Art Pompidou in Paris. One of his New Orleans photographs was featured at the theMAG centennial in exhibition Memory Theatre 2013. For more information, visit mag.rochester.edu. Inside the Rooms That Inspired Peter Copping’s Fall 2016 Collection for Oscar de la Renta 02-17-16 Brooke Bobbs

Enfilade, 2010 Photo: Robert Polidori From Chronophagia, published by Steidl, 2014 Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

As Peter Copping was preparing sketches and gathering images for what would become his Fall 2016 collection for Oscar de la Renta, he kept coming back to one particular book of photographs. The creative director, who showed his line for the house last night, was particularly taken with the interiors and architectural snapshots in photographer Robert Polidori’s book Chronophagia. Specifically, Copping was moved by the photos Polidori had taken during an almost-30-year project documenting the restoration of the Palace of Versailles, which began in the mid-1980s. Polidori’s pictures capture the transition of the palace from a veritable ruin to rich, new splendor, blending decoration from the past with a bright Louis XIV style typified by bold pops of color and exaggerated fabric and wallpaper patterns.

This is precisely what Copping aimed to convey through his latest runway looks. “My inspirations came from thinking about the juxtaposition of something modern against something highly decorative,” he says. “Ornate details are juxtaposed with clean silhouettes in this collection—there are references to classical and 18th-century motifs such as toile de Jouy, but they are reworked by putting them through a technical, pixelated process that gives them a modern feeling.” Copping also cited the Jeff Koons exhibition inside Versailles in 2008, as well as the famous Battle of Versailles fashion show in 1973, in which French designers presented highly embellished collections alongside American designers’ more minimal, utilitarian lines. For a man who has been quite successful at balancing Mr. De la Renta’s legacy with the vision of a new guard, this is an interiors-inspired collection for the books.

The Fabulous World of Lynn Wyatt 02-15-16 Jerry Stafford

Courtesy of Robert Polidori and Paul Kasmin Gallery

A true dynamo in the Texas mold, for decades this irrepressible patron of the arts in all their forms has attracted the friendship of the biggest names in fashion, film, and more with her signature mélange of grace and taste.

Lynn Wyatt descends the sweeping staircase of her home in Houston’s River Oaks enclave in a figure-hugging, kingfisher blue satin dress. Crossing her impeccably appointed salon on vertiginous heels, she takes a perch against an embroidered taffeta cushion on a striped chaise longue—right between a pair of Andy Warhol silkscreens featuring her glamorous visage. With a seductive Southern blend of humility and hyperbole, she launches into one of her memorable anecdotes.

“I had decided that Andy was the John Singer Sargent of our time,” Wyatt begins, “and that if I was going to have my portrait done it was going to be by him. He came to my house and took Polaroids of me. And then I didn’t hear anything from him. I forgot about it. Finally, I found out that he had done four portraits. He told me to choose the two that I thought went best together, because he always thought of portraits as a pair, to be hung an exact number of inches apart….About ten years ago, somebody said ‘I saw your portrait in Japan!’ And I replied, ‘Well, she sure does get around!’

Only slightly less incredible than the portrait’s global reach is the fact that Wyatt, who celebrated her 80th birthday last year with an Art Deco–themed fundraiser for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, defiantly maintains the same svelte silhouette, gilded coiffure, and ruby red lips that she did when she first posed for the artist over three decades ago.

Wyatt's Warhols, which the artist painted in around 1980.

The Wyatt residence, where Lynn and her husband of 50 years, Oscar—who famously mortgaged his Ford Mustang in the 1950s for $400 and turned it into the Coastal Oil Coporation—have lived for the last decade, sits off of a wide road lined with towering pines, live oaks, azaleas, and crepe myrtle blossoms and is a modest affair compared to some of the more extravagant Spanish-style ranch houses and French faux chateaux that make up this part of town. The River Oaks abode boasts one of the most glamorous water closets in the world, where her collection of original Helmut Newton photographs—including a black-and-white portrait of herself in a sweeping Yves Saint Laurent cape, set against the stark backdrop of an oil field—lives in leopard-lined luxury.

Although she avers true collecting chops, Wyatt's home features a stylized mix of the historic and the contemporary, from the Louis XIV–style furnishings to the Helen Frankenthaler painting above the fireplace to the zebra-patterned ottoman.

She is quick, however, to disavow any studied mix in the works of art and antiques which fill the house, an eclectic selection that includes an oil by French Impressionist Edouard Vuillard, a snakebite kit customized by close friend Truman Capote with photographs of death-row prison inmates, and Wyatt’s own Fauvist-influenced landscape paintings. “I do not consider myself a collector as such,” she says—at least, not like her close friends Karl Lagerfeld or Elton John— “although I do have some special works. I love myHelen Frankenthaler, quite possibly the smallest painting she ever did, and myJeff Elrod. And of course, I love my Warhols,” she says. “I admire people who collect and I have the greatest respect for people that are involved in the arts.”

Wyatt, brought up to give back, is more closely involved in fund-raising for the arts, as vice-chairman of the Houston Grand Opera, an executive committee member of the Alley Theatre, and trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts. She is involved in the Star Mission for the Homeless, and for the past four years she has served as International Cultural Ambassador for the Rothko Chapel.

When her friend Helmut Newton found out about Wyatt's tribute room, "he sent me a picture of himself pointing right at the camera," she says. "Underneath he wrote : 'I am watching you.'”

The chapel, commissioned in 1964 by French émigrés and celebrated art patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil, was designed by Philip Johnson and dedicated in 1971 as a nondenominational space that would provide not only a spiritual sanctuary but also the home for 14 extraordinary painted panels by Mark Rothko, whose meditative intensity the painter felt was the

“crowning achievement” of his career. Proceeds from her current auction, for which Wyatt has marshaled contributions from her friends as well as her own holdings, will benefit the chapel.

Wyatt relates, “I was in great admiration of Mrs. D. long before she built the Menil Collection,” referring to the Houston museum that holds the rest of the Menils’ art. “She would arrange objects and space in such a considered way. She would direct your gaze. You would walk down a narrow darkened passageway and there would be one incredible painting—just one. She really influenced the way I looked at art. ”

In tribute to her friend, Wyatt created the Rothko Chapel Visionary Award, recipients of which have included Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (whom Wyatt first met when he acted as her guide in Tibet) and Bianca Jagger, the international human rights campaigner. In 2014 the actress Tilda Swintoncalled the chapel “an inspiration to us all” in her moving acceptance speech.

The Rothko Chapel in Houston is one beneficiary of Wyatt's philanthropic activities, where she seeks to build on the legacy of its founders, Jean and Dominique de Menil.

Wyatt may downplay her own role as art patron, but there is one area of expertise which she cannot deny: fashion and style. One of Capote’s original “swans” alongside Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith, and Marella Agnelli, Wyatt has for decades been an influential client of the greatest European and American couture houses. For proof, one need only to survey the names that adorn the 16 couture pieces from her personal collection—Hubert de Givenchy, Valentino Garavani, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro—that she has donated for an auction of 37 pieces from herself and her friends.

“I became really close friends with all of them,” explains Wyatt. “I would go to their shows and then we’d go out to dinner. Emanuel even came to Houston, where I had a big party for him in our old house. He still remembers what dishes I served! … It is so flattering to hear when people still remember. Hubert is wonderful! I call him on his birthday, and he calls me on mine, and every time I go to Paris we have dinner together. He is a gentleman’s gentleman, so special and loyal. Loyalty is

so important. Yves was very shy. But I liked him very much and I appreciated this part of his character. “

Two of the auction’s most exquisite gowns are indeed by Saint Laurent, and both were worn by Wyatt on shoot in collaboration with art photographerRobert Polidori: one, a 1980s crimson-and- black taffetas changeant cascade of couture ruffles, was captured on the stage of her beloved Houston Opera, while a fuschia velvet column and black bolero with glass bead embellishments was framed against the chapel’s moody Rothko panels.

Wyatt in the Rothko Chapel, wearing a custom couture creation by Yves Saint Laurent and photographed for System magazine by Robert Polidori. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

When pressed to recall on which occasion she wore such and such a gown or cocktail, Wyatt smiles and shrugs playfully. “I never remember what I wear to any event! I always decide at the last minute….My wonderful little maid Edna can remember everything that I wore everywhere, and what I wore with it. For me getting dressed is the fun bit. My friend Nan Kempner used to always say that getting dressed was often more fun than the party itself!"

She does, however, remember what she wore to her birthday ball last October. She asked Peter Copping, who had recently been appointed head designer at the house of Oscar de la Renta, to dress her for the evening. Copping describes Wyatt as one of an "ever more rare breed who know what quality and luxury are,” and remembers that “her only demand was that it be good for boogie-ing! It was, and she did.” As only Lynn Wyatt could.

Help support the Rothko Chapel by bidding on couture creations from Wyatt's own closet, film and music memorabilia from famous friends, and fashionable prints and photographs in The Collector: Lynn Wyatt, through February 29.

Top image: Wyatt photographed for System magazine with Dan Flavin's installation at the Menil Collection, Houston, by Robert Polidori. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery. All photographs by Kyle Knodell for Paddle8, except where noted.

A Famous Texan Socialite on Feeling Comfortable in Couture 02-16-16 Erica Schweigershausen

Robert Polidori / Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery

The legendary Houston socialite Lynn Wyatt likes to describe her couture gowns as “old friends.” The sentiment refers to her penchant for re-wearing the same custom outfits on multiple occasions — and the fact that many of the dresses were designed by close friends. This week, Wyatt, 80, will auction off 17 of her most iconic couture outfits from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s — including designs by Chanel, Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy — on Paddle8. A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

“I was going to donate them to a museum,” Wyatt says of her gowns, “because they are in pristine condition. I take care of my things.” Wyatt, who describes her own style as “class with a bit of dash, and no trash,” says her interest in fashion developed through osmosis. She’s the granddaughter of the founder of the Sakowitz department store chain, where she convinced her father to let her work as a salesgirl while she was in high school. The auction includes the first couture outfit that Wyatt ever purchased: a classic, 1970 black Chanel bouclé skirt suit. Wyatt’s husband — the oil mogul Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. — “loved Chanel,” and encouraged her to have some pieces made. During an early fitting in Paris, she recalls meeting Coco Chanel herself — ever so briefly. “She popped into the room and looked at me, and said, ‘Oh, so you’re the Texan?’ I said, ‘Yes ma’am.’ She shook hands, and was out the door.”

Wyatt says she favors couture because it makes her feel at ease. “When it’s made to measure, it fits so perfectly,” she says. “You just go out the door and you forget about yourself. I do, anyway.” As a result, she says she doesn’t spend much time agonizing over what to wear. “I don’t decide until the minute I’m going to wear it.” She rarely remembers what she wore to a particular event, but she does recall a compliment bestowed by her longtime friend Bill Blass at a black-tie dinner. “He came up to me and said, ‘You know, you happen to have my dress on backwards,’” Wyatt remembers. “And I said, ‘I know that, because I want it lower in the back and a high neck in the front.’ He looked me up and down and said, ‘You sure look great, babe.’ It was so funny. It was a shock that I did it on purpose, I guess.”

In addition to Wyatt’s cherished couture, the auction also includes an array of art, including Andy Warhol prints, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and an assortment of books and catalogs of Mark Rothko’s work, donated by his family. From her personal collections, Wyatt is including three of Yves Saint Laurent’s “Love” prints — sent as New Year’s cards between 1970 and 2000 — as well as a signed monograph by Helmut Newton, another old friend. (Wyatt’s house in River Oaks has a notorious Helmut Newton-themed powder room, filled with books and photographs. “People go into this guest bathroom, and they stay there for 20 or 30 minutes,” Wyatt says.) Wyatt’s close friends have also donated a number of delightful novelties — from Bono’s Rick Owens leather jacket to a pair of Versace sunglasses from Elton John’s personal collection, and a custom Prada trunk that appeared in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” donated by Wes Anderson. Tilda Swinton — who received the Rothko Chapel Visionary Award in 2014 — opted to donate something a bit more experiential. “She called me and said, ‘I want to read someone a bedtime story over Skype,’” Wyatt says. “She is so special.”

Robert Polidori / Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery

From photographing favelas to shooting the Moon, the mo% %riking images tend to be composites. As an exhibition of planetary images by the arti% Michael Benson opens at the Natural Hi%ory Museum, he and the photographer Robert Polidori fnd their work has much in common ON EARTH AS IT IS IN THE HEAVENS

Above: Michael Benson, Transit of Io, Cassini, January 1, 2001, 2011, right: Mimas Above Saturn’s Rings and Shadows, Cassini, November 7, 2004, 2012

58 Winter 2015 Art Quarterly

I R OLIDO P I: © I: R OLIDO P ES. ALL ALL ES. CTUR ON PI ON K I T ENSON, KINE ENSON, B HAEL HAEL C /MI L JP NASA RY, RY, ALLE G S R E W LO Y F ES URT O ALL BENSON: C BENSON: ALL

Art Quarterly Winter 2015 59

This winter a major exhibition of highly your own satellite. Then, when you said you a given theory, what I’m looking for is a diferent detailed images of planets, moons and the got the images from Nasa, I wanted to order of discovery. Sun opens at the Natural History Museum. know: did you pay per picture, or per hour On the other hand, sometimes you fnd eight You’d be forgiven for thinking they were of download time? hours of observations from a spacecraft that has photographs. Instead, they have been Michael Benson Actually, I don’t pay at all. been ordered to take multiple shots of diferent meticulously constructed by the artist The raw material for the images I put together is sections of an object using all three visible light Michael Benson (b1962), based on data all in the public domain because it was funded flters – red, green and blue in orderly succession mined from the archives at Nasa and the by tax-payers, so Nasa raw data is available to the – and in neat longitudinal rows. And that’s just European Space Agency and more usually world. For me, it’s one of the great achievements fantastic. Then, speaking of data, you’re in the analysed by astrophysicists. ‘This is not of our civilisation that the raw data from these Garden of Earthly Delights! Because by “just” science,’ he says. Rather, ‘The visual missions is freely available, and any researcher compositing them you can get not just individual legacy of 60 years of planetary exploration anywhere can access it and draw their own colour images, but can then assemble them in constitutes an important chapter in the conclusions. As for me, I go into these archives large-scale composite mosaics. history of photography.’ His composite and dig for extraordinary images. Then once Of course, then other issues intrude. working method, however, has much in I’ve located the raw material – dozens or even Frequently the images were taken from common with that of the Canadian-born hundreds of raw frames – I assemble what I hope a spacecraft moving faster than a rifle bullet. photographer Robert Polidori (b1951), will end up being compelling photographs. So viewing geometries can change. It’s an whose meticulously detailed, large-format RP So you download several images and interesting challenge. Take, for example, Transit colour-film photographs can be found in then composite them together? of Io, which was made from an hour’s worth the collections of the Metropolitan Museum MB Yes. Only rarely do I use single frames. In of raw frames. I chose the moment the Moon of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in order to make a colour picture, the spacecraft has crossed Jupiter’s limb, and organised the larger New York, the Los Angeles County Museum to have taken images of the same subject through composition around it. You end up going for of Art, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris two or more flters. These appear as black-and- a kind of aggregate truth. and the Moreira Salles Institute in Rio white frames. With luck, they’re shot through RP Do you ever combine data from de Janeiro. red, green and blue flters – then you can make different satellites? They talked in New York, where both an RGB composite. So there’s a kind of alchemy, MB Rarely, but sometimes. One comes to mind. are based. in which you take sometimes very ify black-and- I was working on my frst book in 2003, going white frames and transmute them into colour through many thousands of images from the Robert Polidori We first met about three images. If I’m lucky, the subject will have been two Voyagers as they passed Jupiter. Late one years ago at the Laumont [photographic] photographed through at least a red and blue night I came across this one shot that I thought lab viewing room. There was something flter. Ideally, green also, but it’s not totally was a mistake. You could see the horizon, the I had to check on, and there you were. necessary. I can always make a synthetic green day-night boundary, and there was something I only saw the back of you, gazing at that frame. In that case, while you won’t have all the weird going on in Jupiter’s dark side. I thought print [Typhoon over Bay of Bengal, Terra, data possible, it’ll be a plausible composite. it was a transmission error of some kind, and December 15, 2003; 2012]. Usually in that RP And why is it they would have chosen went breezing by. And then about half an hour situation, I’d look the other way, but I kept not to have a green filter? later I thought, ‘Wait a second…’ And I went looking at your picture because I thought it MB Sometimes they don’t even use flters in back to try to relocate it. When I found it, after was really good. I was immediately struck the visible spectrum at all, because they are a bit of contrast enhancement, I realised that by its beauty, for lack of a better word, and examining, say, the atmosphere of Saturn in I was witnessing a moon rising on Jupiter’s night I wanted to know how you’d generated it. infrared wavelengths. Of course, the purpose side. It was an extraordinary moment; there I thought the print was pretty good too, of these missions is not colour landscape was something spooky and amazing about it. though you were rejecting it. And then we photography. They’re out there to conduct pure I thought: ‘My God, I’m one of the few people started talking. Of course, I asked how you research. And just as scientists of various stripes who’s ever seen this sight.’ got the image. I was sure you didn’t own go into the archives looking for confrmation of It was Io, the volcanic moon, rising above the

60 Winter 2015 Art Quarterly Left: Michael Benson, Basaltic Dune Field in Gusev Crater, Mars, Spirit Rover, December 30, 2005-January 1, 2006, 2012; right: Robert Polidori, Dharavi #1, Mumbai, India, 2008; below: Benson, Io Rising, Voyager 1, February 24, 1979, 2003

planetary horizon on the nightside of Jupiter. So because there were hundreds of people space. When we frst met you were working on I dug further and found neighbouring frames, out there. Should the shot be based on that series [of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro], and you and enough flters to make colour composites of compositional elegance? On investigation told me there was some pushback from certain Jupiter itself. But, unfortunately, there was no into what it is that people are doing? curators about that way of approaching colour data for Io itself. So I sent it to my There are so many levels that one can phenomenal reality by using multiple shots. collaborator, the planetary scientist Paul Geissler, examine phenomena on. You can’t take RP Yes, you’re correct. About 10 years ago who, using data from a later mission, came up a picture of the entire world and you can’t I started to question the whole notion with colour information. And he sent me a patch. make an eternal film. So somewhere of one shutter exposure and one image. So most of the photo is data from Voyager in 1979, along the line you must make choices. And also I maybe wanted to get away from but a small bit of colour came from the Galileo I look to make an empirical emblematic the sort of rectangle or square being the Orbiter, 20 years later. For better or worse, the image where the icon is the emblem of accepted aspect ratio of the iconographical image actually spans two decades. that context and phenomenon. plane. I think the 90-degree thing is really RP It’s a choice. It’s its own reality. MB It reminds me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s a legacy from window design and the way MB Yeah. When you have a composite image, observation that flm difers from the other carpenters make window frames. It really like some of your recent multiframe images of arts in that it reveals time unfolding. He does come from that. However, in some of favelas in Brazil, there’s a sense of reality called it ‘sculpting in time’. But you can the cityscapes that you’re alluding to, the compounded, isn’t there? A reality in which sometimes sense this even in still images. Like irregular mosaic shapes owe their origin time has unfolded to a greater degree. I’m struck in your India pictures. They’re not one-click to [the realisation] that I take pictures with in this specifc work by how visible, temporal moments. There is a complexity unfolding wide-angle lenses. Any wide-angle lens reality seems to punch through the blank page, within them that encompasses more than has a distortion: the more outward you go, or the blank screen. a split-second shutter fall. the more elongated it gets; the more RP In those particular images, I would sit In that respect, I think we’re both interested towards the centre, the smaller and tighter and gaze from a second-floor balcony, in duration and extension: space and time. For it gets, to get it all into the frame. The lens trying to figure out when would be the example, I was just looking at some of your itself, like our eyes, sees in a curve. It’s like meaningful moment to click, to capture, favelas. They seem to sprawl across more than in mapping strategies, when we make a map of the Earth on a flat piece of paper, somewhere it’s going to distort. It’s just a matter of what you want to preserve: shape conformity or area conformity. MB So you choose your poison, so to speak. RP Yeah. So I began to make wide-angle shots with telephoto lenses that have the least amount of distortion – but even they have some, so I just use the centre portion. I pan across; then I recompose them with Photoshop, and enlarge certain things depending on their proximity; and since I want to keep shape conformity, I end up with irregular perimeters. This comes from mapping strategy. We may call it photography, but we share the ‘-graphy’ part of the word with geography. So, rather than clipping parts of the image off to fit in a window and make it seem as

Art Quarterly Winter 2015 61 62 Winter 2015 Art Quarterly Left: Polidori, Salles les maisons royales, Salles du XVII, Aile du Nord, 1er étage, Château de Versailles, France 2005

‘You very rarely see a human fgure in [Polidori’s] work. Rather, we see the structures within which we live. For example, in your Versailles project, the palace is a kind of depopulated palimpsest’

Art Quarterly Winter 2015 63 Left: Polidori, View from St. Claude Avenue Bridge, New Orleans, LA, 2005; right: Operating Room, Pripyat, 2001; below right: Doorstop, Antichambre de la Chapelle, 1er étage, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France, 2007

though I took it all at once, I just leave all MB Another of the things about your work that I and transmute it. This links to the oracular the references, all the information, there to fnd interesting is that you very rarely see a human role photography can have. make clear the autogenesis of the project. fgure. Rather, we see the structures within which I think this division between subjective But getting back to you, Michael, I think we live. For example, in your Versailles project, and objective, between expressionist that you’re one of the few artists who the palace is a kind of depopulated palimpsest. and impressionist, is the axis from which basically uses or recomposes data to make RP I have done a book of portraits, but I’ll the impulse to make art has oscillated an aestheticised digested knowledge pool. put that subject aside for now. As far as the over many centuries. I sometimes have the You use it as a discovery device. You stand Versailles work goes, the people who made feeling that in centuries to come, when apart from the crowd in that respect. it and who lived there no longer exist. I people look at a lot of the fine art that was MB I’m defnitely interested in the ways in which guess I could take photos of the tourists, or generated during this period, they’re going knowledge is encoded in image. I got into that museum curators. But I’m more interested to find it psychologically rich as a kind of in my last book, Cosmigraphics. As a civilisation, in it as a museum of history. My intent was Rorschach test of how people’s subjective we tend to undervalue the image as a bearer to take portraits of historical time. states were vibrating during a time of of knowledge. Instead, we tend to understand, In the taxi on my way here, I was great cultural change. But it’s not really rich acknowledge and encode ideas primarily in thinking, ‘Why is it that I am so interested in what I would call a philosophical or words, or mathematical equations. And I fnd that in Michael’s work?’ And what came to intellectual overview. puzzling. Why do we have museums all over the mind was that you are a countercurrent in If we go back to the 19th or 20th century world, these temples of image, if we don’t think today’s contemporary-art world. I would in photography, when the camera was used they bear worthwhile knowledge? Anybody who say 99 per cent of contemporary as a tool with which to acquire knowledge, studies art seriously has intuitively to understand iconography is about the artist’s the artists’ or photographers’ subjective that images contain civilisational knowledge. emotional-to-psychic reaction to their own reactions are inscribed there, but they are One thing that I think of when I consider your life experience. Photography has been… not the subject of their work, just as your work, and also maybe what I’m trying to do, is I was going to say reduced, but perhaps reactions are not the subject of your images. [the German physicist] Werner Heisenberg’s line relegated is better. Photographers and MB Yeah. That reminds me of that Joycean point that, ‘what we observe is not nature itself, but artists have decided, I guess in harmony of view. In Portrait of the Artist, Joyce has Stephen nature exposed to our method of questioning’. with what they think the times are, that the Dedalus say: ‘The artist, like the God of creation, Because your method of questioning is very main thing of interest is the maker him- or remains within or behind or beyond or above his apparent in your work, somehow. herself, and their subjective reaction to the handiwork, invisible, refned out of existence, When you, Robert Polidori, go, for example, contemporary phenomenological world. indiferent, paring his fngernails.’ to Versailles, you have a very specifc way of In other words, we are living in a time RP Yes. ‘Paring his fingernails.’ What I feel looking at it. You see a set of things, ways in which where the basic prevalent aesthetic is you do is aestheticise data. Scientists what’s already on view there, on the walls, in the expressionistic. It’s the expression of the examine it, looking for exceptions to rules architecture, codify a world view, a history. And maker that is of interest, and their unique that make them reconsider what the rules your photographs are in dialogue with that. They reaction to the world. In this way, most are, whereas you sift through it to come show history as it unfolded, and they themselves contemporary artists in the West do not up with an artist’s idealised view of certain become part of history, unfolding. celebrate their historical context, they celestial bodies. They have a kind of There’s one picture in particular that I celebrate their relation to it. They place completeness and also, by the way, a great remember from your Versailles series where you themselves apart. Whereas you could call sense of beauty. I mention this because simply see the efects of a hanging hook that’s what we do impressionistic. We use the I find that beauty, whatever that means, is meant to hold a door open, the efects of two laws of physics to acquire knowledge. a state that many contemporary artists, for or three centuries of it swinging against the wall. We discover. To simplify, in relying on whatever reason, want to avoid. So you see this patina of time. their subjective states the expressionists MB Yes, it’s incredible. RP That hook has actually made an are creators. While the impressionists RP They want the off moment. I don’t know indentation in the stone. are discoverers. We take objective data why they habitually strive to glorify

64 Winter 2015 Art Quarterly ‘There’s a great sense of beauty in your work, which is paradoxical when the subject is Chernobyl. Maybe it’s “beauty as the start of endurable terror”, in the Rilkean sense’

psychologically deﬁcient states. I suppose, abstract art – though I think I’m more of a fan I see things vanishing because of the however, that, statistically, one’s life is of abstract art than you are – or art that’s not… overwhelming change technology has overwhelmingly composed of banal and RP …referential. brought about. I feel compelled to make unremarkable moments. MB Yes. That resonates with me in a certain records. There are secret bills to pay. MB Beauty is viewed with suspicion because it’s specifc way because I think part of what I’m MB And not so secret. I’m always thinking that seductive, and seduction is associated with trying to do with my work is to pull the human the work I’ve been doing with planetary images advertising and propaganda and, in general, is gaze away from this endless self-absorption, from wouldn’t have been possible without all of the highly suspect. the onanistic nature of our concerns on this military research [relating to] ballistic missiles and RP In New York the generally accepted planet. Politics, all our miserable provincial tribal so on. It’s very dialectical. prevalent bias is that if it’s beautiful it bullshit, this endless self-absorption. There’s an RP And yet looking back at Earth from means it’s stupid, if it’s unaesthetic or ugly element of détournement also, by the way, in the space… it means that it is intelligent. sense that I’m taking something intended for one MB Yes. Seeing that fragile oasis and all that. MB And there’s a great sense of beauty in your purpose and using it for another. It has an ethical, It’s become clichéd but, actually, it’s very work as well. Which is paradoxical when the even a political dimension. But unlike with meaningful, I think. It’s one of the reasons we subject is the Chernobyl ‘Zone’, or New Orleans the Situationists, it’s not for purposes of overt have the environmental movement. I see my after the deluge. Maybe it’s ‘beauty as the start political provocation. work as in some ways ftting into that nexus of of endurable terror’, in the Rilkean sense. In your RP I also stand apart from that because meanings: the ongoing quest for a meta-view. work I can also sense a progression, a placement I have no interest in it. But I’m conscious RP It’s really about cosmology, I think. within the centuries of research. You can see of the historical conscience of the 20th MB And ontology. It’s about trying to fnd a it in paintings by the great Renaissance masters, and 21st centuries. I’m basically obsessed broader stage, a wider sweep, a larger context who were striving towards something, and with recording what will no longer exist. than what we’re accustomed to considering. researching the nature of optics as much as they And that’s one of the great achievements of the were producing paintings. In fact, they were past half-century, that we’ve achieved this, at least doing both. They were part of a process leading the beginnings of it. But how many people really to photography, and your work joins that stream, think about it, or incorporate it into their world as part of a continuing process. view? Take the famous ‘overview efect’ RP I use the word ‘iconography’ rather [a term used to describe the cognitive shift than ‘image-making’ because I like in awareness experienced by some astronauts representational iconography. Because when they look back on Earth from orbit and I consider it a language, like so-called see it as a tiny fragile sphere without national non-representational or abstract art. For boundaries]. Or the frst photos from Apollo 8 me, there is nothing purely decorative in of Earthrise over the Moon, in 1968. nature. There’s nothing inherently wrong RP That’s what I love about photography. with decoration, but I feel that iconography It always makes me feel like a magician. By is deeper inasmuch as the image represents using laws of physics I can coax the world something else, and makes references into revealing itself. to the outside world concerning the MB Exactly! composition or nature of phenomena at ‘Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System’, large. Where decorative art only refers to its featuring more than 70 composite images by own self and the nature of its own self, so Michael Benson, Natural History Museum, it’s more navel-contemplation. Iconography London SW7, 22 January to 15 May. nhm.ac.uk, is a kind of composite language. £5.40 with National Art Pass, £9.90 (standard). MB That links with something you once said to Both artists are represented by Flowers Gallery me about the solipsistic, navel-gazing nature of London W1 and E2, flowersgallery.com

Art Quarterly Winter 2015 65 WALLS MEMORIES: ROBERT POLIDORI AT HOTEL PETRA 12-10-15 Felicity Carter

Once grand, Hotel Petra, Beirut remained concealed for 23 years and over this time slowly, quietly, beautifully deteriorated, taking on a different persona. It is this form of decaying evolution that captivated the acclaimed photographer, Robert Polidori whose work has been shown in Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Through Polidori’s series entitled Hotel Petra, he presents interior shots of a building that lived through the violence of the Lebanese civil war, and the natural processes of decay. Much more than views of an interior though, these photographs explore the “memories of the walls” and the consequences of social, historical and political changes on a concrete form. The walls of Hotel Petra are covered with numerous coats of paint that, through ageing have faded and peeled, revealing the underlying colours that have taken on different tones over time, adding to the authenticity of Hotel Petra’s aged state.

FC What is it about Hotel Petra, and its form of decaying evolution that you found so captivating?

RP It’s rare to see untouched decay in the man-made world. Most of the time it lives with a human co-existence, and because of this man alters a normal organic evolution. The pictures that I took at the Hotel Petra are as much about “Painting”.

They resemble in many ways certain modernist non-representational art works. What I find fascinating about these “natural paintings” on the walls of the Hotel Petra is that as aesthetic as they look, they are a product of no one’s intent, and furthermore they have such a delicate surface that could only be produced by being undisturbed by human hands for over 2 decades.

FC Do you think there is Romanticism in ruins?

RP This “Romanticism” is an emotional or sentimental reaction that many people inject to the witnessing of decay or ruins in many contemporary Industrial societies. I am reminded of Buddha’s last dying words where he stated that decay is inherent to all composite matter. Decay is a measure and trace of time, no more no less. Time waits for no one. Personally, I don’t perceive ruins as being “Romantic”, I perceive them as being the end product of the phenomena of time.

“MADE OVER TIME BY PAINTING AND DEMOLITION CREWS. COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS SEEMED TO HAVE MADE THESE IMAGES.” – ROBERT POLIDORI