Robert Polidori: Eye & I

Description

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 over thirty 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 gaze of mutual regard. Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of exhibitions in New York, London, Brazil, Montreal, among other places. He received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006, Polidori's series of photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bestselling books Havana (2003), Zones of Exclusion-Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003), After the Flood (2006), Parcours Museologique Revisite (2009) and Some Points in Between... Up Till Now (2010) are published by Steidl.

Polidori manages to discover a radianace and gentleness that contrasts with the usual visual representation of the lives of these people. Throughout the pages, we see the same smiles and same colors on the faces of older generations, workers, soldiers, merchants, armed civilians, the poor and the religious. Because Polidori remains sensitive to architecture and objects. Somewhat standard but beautiful to touch, the portraits in Eye & I reveal the anthropological approach of every photographer of reality, including those who choose to represent its many laws through silence.--Jonas Cuenin "L'Oeil de la Photographie"