Points Between... Up Till Now

An archaeologist of haunted walls and loaded spaces, Robert Polidori (born 1951) photographs the inside and the outside of private and public dwellings as they transition from one state to another, whether from humble household to horrific disaster zone, or dilapidated grandeur to hygienic modernity. Polidori possesses an amazing ability to suggestively record the accumulation of meanings in any given habitat, and to convey human presence-paradoxically, often in spaces that have been abandoned or are devoid of visible human subjects. A passage from one of Polidori's decisive early reading encounters, Gaston Bachelard's 1957 The Poetics of Space, seems aptly addressed to his photography: "Through the brilliance of an image," writes Bachelard, "the distant past resounds with echoes... In experiencing the reverberation of a poetic image, we find the real measure of its being." Some Points in Between assembles, for the first time, each of Robert Polidori's major photographic series in one affordably priced volume: Beirut (on post-civil-war Lebanon), Versailles (on the restoration of the palace), Havana (on Castro's Cuba), After the Flood (on post-Katrina New Orleans) and Zones of Exclusion (on the nuclear disasters at Pripyat and Chernobyl). Some Points in Between allows us to survey the consistency and clarity of Polidori's themes and concerns across three decades.Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives in New York City. His work has been shown in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, at prestigious venues such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musee d'art contemporain in Montreal. 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 Brazil.