Robert Polidori
Robert Polidori was born in 1951 in Montreal, Canada, to a French Canadian mother and a Corsican father. He moved to the United States when he was ten and arrived in New York in 1969, where he got as job as an assistant to filmmaker Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives, producing a number of avant-garde films in the early 1970s. In 1980 he received an M.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and subsequently turned his attention to still photography. He has been living in Paris and New York City since 1987. He is listed as a staff photographer with The New Yorker magazine and makes frequent contributions to other magazines such as Vanity Fair.
Polidori's works have been seen in many mediums, from the New Yorker to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a leading artist of human tragedy and suffering. The high level of detail allows the viewer to question things more and more as well as still be touched by the mood of the works. Due to the nature of the modern camera lens, the analytical sense of his images comes from the pre-Renaissance and Renaissance perspectives.
Далее:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Polidori
См. много работ здесь:
Robert Polidori
St Patricks Cathedral
New York City
Vintage Car with Composite Parts, 1997
Havana
http://www.artnet.com/artist/13621/robert-polidori.html
Robert Polidori
By Robert Ayers
Published: September 23, 2006
To commemorate the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, ARTINFO has brought back our AI Interview with photographer Robert Polidori, first published in Sept. 2006, on the eve of the opening of his exhibition "New Orleans after the Flood" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
PARIS—Robert Polidori is among the most respected of contemporary photographers. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and his books Havana (2001) and Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003) have cemented his reputation as a leading artist of human tragedy and pathos. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Fortune and The New Yorker magazine, where he is a staff photographer.
In September, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is presenting “New Orleans after the Flood,” an exhibition of Polidori’s photographs taken immediately after Katrina tore through the city. And another show from the same body of work opens at Flowers Gallery in London later in October.
As it turns out, Polidori is as eloquent in conversation as he is in his photographs…
Некоторые технические детали:
Robert, I’m looking forward to seeing your work on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. Tell me, as you see it, what is the difference between seeing your work in the New Yorker or in the pages of one of your books and seeing it on a gallery or museum wall?
I won’t comment on the sociological differences because those are obvious. But physically, the prints at the Met are bigger and better. It’s not the case that bigger is always better, but in this case, they are. I shoot almost exclusively in large format. All of the images in the show were shot as 5-by-7-inch sheet film originals, which is an anachronism, because nobody shoots in 5-by-7 inch any more. I buy the film from Kodak specially cut for me. I like high resolution and a lot of detail. You see a lot more in the [Met] prints than you do on the little printed page of a magazine, so that’s one difference. Also, prints from the red-green-blue color world are richer than what you get from the cyan-magenta-yellow-black separations of the lithographically printed page.
И вот такой диалог:
And how does that relate to the pictorial sophistication of your images?
I’m not one of these artists who’s making art about the processes or the rules of art-making. I’m not interested in that. I think that that’s been gone through, and I think that it’s one dimensional. It’s not about art-making. However, there are aesthetic principals there, pictorially speaking. The grammar of my pictorialism comes from pre-Renaissance and Renaissance perspective, because all of that stuff is built into modern lenses. So that is assumed in the technology that I use.
What would you say was your basic reason for taking photographs?
I don’t take photographs because I love doing it (though I don’t hate it). Some photographers are in love with the process of taking a picture. Psychologically, I’m more interested in the situations that taking the picture puts me through, and what it forces me to witness. I really do it because I want that picture. It’s like I’m collecting evidence, like a detective looking to solve a case. I don’t mean that literally, but I use it as a simile. It’s a thing about phenomena and asking questions. And answering some, but not answering all of them.
Страница 1:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/19350 ... -polidori/
Вторая:
…Yes, I see that. It’s like you were saying earlier about reality’s paradoxes. It seems to me that this is what makes these New Orleans pictures so poignant. Each image presents the evidence of someone’s neat and ordered life that’s just been turned upside down.
Yes, it’s imploded. I’m interested in interiors, and I have been for a long time, simply because they’re indices of individuals’ personal values. They tell you a lot about the individual. Like I’ve said before, to me interiors are both metaphors and catalysts for states of being. You can take a portrait of somebody, and you might have a feeling looking at their face, but you know less things about them by looking at their face than you do when you look at the way that they compose their own interior space. What interests me are their values.
Even in portraiture I don’t like the snapshot. I like the formal portrait because I like it when the subject chooses his or her own pose. I’m not interested as much in what I feel about the subject as I am interested in what the subject feels about themselves. In psychological terms, we’re talking about the super-ego, and that’s what interests me. And I photograph almost everything in the world except myself. I guess I’m outward-looking.
The other difference between the snapshot and the formal portrait is the length of the exposure. That’s important to you, isn’t it?
I’ll paraphrase Dieter Appelt, a German artist, who said “the snapshot is of a moment that will never occur again, and the long exposure is of a moment that never occurred to begin with.” All the things I do are long exposures. When I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I was interested in so-called “spirit photography.” Even though I know it’s all fake I like it anyway, because I like what it tries to do, which is to reveal an inner truth. So I use long exposures because of that, but also because I photograph in such dark places and usually I don’t use artificial lighting. I like natural light. I like the certain look that it gives.
Apparently you didn’t have any choice when you were in New Orleans.
No. There was no electricity. It was very dark inside those houses (and it was stinky too). We’re talking 400- or 500- or 600-second exposures.
And yet they’re so incredibly sharp.
This sounds very simple, but I think that photographs should be taken of still things…
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/19350 ... ri/?page=2
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См. еще специально дискуссию о снимках Полидори катастрофы в Новом Орлеане:
What’s Wrong With This Picture? *
http://fotoarttoo.blogspot.com/2006/09/ ... cture.html
Еще:
Robert Polidori defends his post-K decisions
By Doug MacCash
Arts writer
In Lagniappe on July 13, I wrote that post-Katrina photos by Robert Polidori had been incongruously used in a Brazilian anti-smoking campaign (See Broad Strokes: Art News in this blog)…
http://fotoarttoo.blogspot.com/2006/09/ ... cture.html
