Robert Polidori

Questel Staircase, Chateau de Versailles

1985

Photographer Robert Polidori is inspired by the interior environments of everyday life. He is acclaimed for his contemporary style and is known for his visually stunning large-scale color photography. Each image captures the rich details of a place where people have lived, worked, played and loved.

Polidori was born in Montréal, Canada, and moved to the United States as a child. Early in his career, he was an assistant to the celebrated avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas at Anthology Film Archives in New York. This experience shaped his perspectives on photography, particularly the relationship between still images and time. Today, his photographs are a mediation on how architecture conveys history and memory.

Polidori lived in Paris in the early 1980s. While there, he documented the interior restoration of the Palace of Versailles and has returned to photograph its ongoing changes ever since. Polidori also documented the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the deteriorating mansions of Havana, Cuba. In 2005, he photographed the destruction of New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina and later exhibited the photos in a solo show called “After the Flood.”

Polidori’s work is in museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec in Montréal and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He is a two-time recipient of the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography (in 1999 and 2000) and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for photography in 2020. Polidori’s photographs have been the subject of numerous books released by the German publisher Steidl.

In 2015, Polidori moved to Ojai, California, where he continues to live and work. His recent photograph collection, Dendritic Cities, focuses on the urban growth of cities like Mumbai, Amman and Rio de Janeiro.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Robert Polidori’s photography.