Ethnicity:
Robert Polidori’s mother was French-Canadian and his father came from Corsica.
Robert Polidori was born on February 10, 1951, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In 1960, he relocated to the United States with his family. Polidori supported the family by serving at Air Force bases and NASA installations as an engineer.
Robert Polidori attended the University of Florida in 1969. Under the impression from Michael Snow's movie ‘Wavelength’, Polidori made a decision to pursue his further studies in filmmaking and moved to New York City where he became a student of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He graduated in 1980 with a Master of Arts degree.
Robert Polidori started his career in the 1970s when he was invited by Jonas Mekas to assist him at the Anthology Film Archives where he also served as a theatre manager.
By the next decade, Polidori developed an interest in still photography. His debut project, focused on capturing the memory of abandoned interiors, became the left apartments in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. In 1983, the photographer visited Paris where he initiated the series of pictures reflecting the restoration process of Château de Versailles. During the 30 subsequent years, he continued to capture the changes in the castle. By the end of the 1990s, Polidori took part at The New Yorker’s project photographing the decline of Havana’s architectural historic buildings. In 1998, he became the magazine’s staff member and served there till 2006.
The other major photo series of Robert Polidori include the pictures of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and Mumbai’s slums, the construction of new buildings in Dubai, the devastating consequences of Hurricane Katrina and the following renovation of New Orleans architecture, and the Hotel Petra abandoned during Lebanon’s civil war. His pictures of Chernobyl’s control room and the ghost town of Pripyat were gathered in a 2003 volume ‘Zones of Exclusion – Pripyat and Chernobyl’, and those of Hurricane Katrina’s natural disaster aftermath have been exhibited in New Orleans, New York City, London, Venice, and Toronto.
In 2015, Robert Polidori relocated with his family to Ojai, California where he lives and works nowadays. He currently concentrates on capturing the urban extension of such cities as Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Amman.
Robert Polidori is considered as one of the best representatives of large-scale photography and widely recognized as the master of the architectural genre.
A prolific artist, he has issued about 15 volumes of his pictures, including the most recent books Hotel Petra and 60 Feet Road, both of 2016.
Polidori has been a recipient of World Press Photo Award of Art, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography (twice), German Photobook Prize, and Liliane Bettencourt Photography Award. His works have been demonstrated in the notable museums and galleries throughout the world, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin, and Instituto Moreira Salles among others.
Polidori’s art is the part of such permanent collections as the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, Centre Pompidou, and Château de Versailles.
In 2013, Robert Polidori’s ‘Green Car’ was purchased at Christie's in Paris for $74,911.
Quotations:
"Besides the obvious sheltering from the extremes of the elements, people make rooms to live in as if they are animated by an unconscious desire to return to a prenatal life, or even before that, to a soul life. This is what they exteriorize in rooms, their internal soul life, or less magically put, their personal values, if you will."
"When you point a camera at something, it is like asking a question. But the picture that emerges is like an answer."
"Personally I am more attracted to photographs that attempt to be more objective and 'emblematic' of a subject’s qualities rather than a personal subjective interpretation of phenomena."
Robert Polidori was characterized by art director Tom Jacobi as “a master of spatial aesthetics”, and writer Von Jochen Siemens described him as “a cultural detective for places with a story to tell”. According to Domus Italiano reviewer Beatrice Zamponi, the photographer “trains his lens on the ruins of recent times, on dilapidated surroundings infused with profound aestheticism, turning them into a subtle instrument of social investigation.”
Quotes from others about the person
"Polidori, his work makes clear, loves the grave, delicate, and poignant beauty of architecture when the distracting presence of human inhabitants is eliminated from photographs." John Updike, writer
"Concerned above all with the human condition, he explains situations – often crisis or disaster – that brings us back to life's essentials and shatter our complacency." Paulette Gagnon, art curator
"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." Stephen Wallis
