Robert Polidori: Rooms with a view

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Coupland, Ken

In the early 1900s, an out-of-work actor named Eugene Atget, who had turned to photography to eke out a living, began recording the fading arrondissements of old Paris, peddling prints of his work to painters, illustrators and historians. Although his express purpose was to create a photographic record of antiquities, Atget's ethereal depictions of the City of Light's vanishing landmarks are suffused with a highly personal vision that still astonishes us today.

Much the same could be said for Robert Polidori, who's perhaps best-known as the architectural photographer of choice for The New York Times. Polidori has roamed the world documenting its greater and lesser architectural glories, in the process amassing a body of work that freely mixes factual reporting with a poetic ambience that doesn't preclude biting social commentary.

As his sumptuous show of oversize color prints last year at New York City's Pace/MacGill Gallery amply demonstrated, for every commercial assignment he has taken Polidori has produced a wealth of more personal narratives to go along with it. "I photograph habitats," he explains. "I'm interested in how people live with architecture, how culture changes a building." Calling from one of the airports where he spends a lot of his time between far-flung locales, Polidori is careful to distance himself from the work that you might call his day job. "I can do that too, but I have wider concerns," he insists.

Whether photographing on assignment or for himself, Polidori delights in the dissonance provided by the contrast between the comforts of habitation and the depredations of time and neglect. "I'm into historical revisionism," he maintains. "I enjoy the paradoxes of passing time." Whether he is shooting a lugubrious block of neomodernist apartments in Old Havana, the squalor inside a derelict Palms Springs hotel, or a former bunker in the war zone that is modern-day Beirut, Polidori revels in decay and disarray. Nothing delights him more than the casual brutality of abandonment, and in a lot of his work it's the absence of people that's striking, as much as the evidence of humans' one-time presence.

Polidori is keenly aware of the irony that architecture, while exemplifying permanence, is ultimately perishable. "When we restore things, we choose to restore them to an epoch that pleases us now. What does it mean to restore? It means to take something old and make it new again, but there's something a bit ersatz about that." Rather than extol their structural qualities, he prefers to ferret out the frailties of the buildings he depicts. Whatever he photographs, Polidori's warts-and-all approach puts him at odds with the professional traditions of his craft. In conversation, he is dismissive-perhaps more so than necessary-of such revered architectural photographers as Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman. "They do what I call 'architectural glamour,'" Polidori scoffs, referring to the cosmetic approach practitioners of the craft have taken to their subjects.

"What I am really, even if it doesn't look like it, is an art photographer. I'm a fake commercial photographer, except that I really try, I do." Few fine-art photographers have combined paying work with their personal vision to the same degree. "I don't go out there with a bad attitude and say I'm better than this," Polidori notes. "I'm into society using me and being used by society."

A French-Canadian by birth, Polidori left his hometown of Montreal at the age of nine and has spent the rest of his time living in the United States and France (until very recently he kept an apartment in Paris). Moving to New York City in the 1970s, he worked for experimental film icon Jonas Mekas and became an avant-garde filmmaker himself. "Even the films I made were about the relationship between still and motion images," he recalls, "and I was always fascinated with other cultures and with traveling."

Frequently, his personal journey takes him indoors, for reasons that are, clearly, highly subjective. An installation he created for the Whitney Museum of Art in 1975 was a meditation on interiors, a preoccupation that has persisted with his current private work. In conversation, Polidori repeatedly comes back to his theme that "rooms are metaphors and catalysts for states of being." There's a more physical, even sexual connotation to interiors, he believes. "The room is the womb."

In person, with his careful grooming and bespoke tailoring, the 50-- year-old Polidori resembles less a disheveled traveler, and more a soigne boulevardier. Greeting his visitor in a light-filled apartment high above New York's Upper West Side, he gets down on the floor and spreads out the color proofs for Havana, his latest publishing project. There's been a glut of published photographs of Old Havana in recent years, but Polidori's handsomely designed tome for the German publisher Steidl has to be the definitive record. Using a timehonored view camera while taking full advantage of the latest digital processing techniques, he stakes his highly individual claim to addressing the city's crumbling but still-magnificent historical record. He doesn't always focus on the building in its entirety, either. A shot of an otherwise nondescript tenement courtyard has a moment of unexpected drama: a limp towel on a clothesline, photographed in light worthy of Vermeer.