Paolo Roversi

Paolo Roversi has been working in Paris for over three decades. His career in fashion photography fully materialised working for Elle, Marie Claire and Christian Dior in the early 1980s. He has photographed many fashion icons including Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss using Polaroid and other medium. Most recently he has become famous for his large format nudes.

“Over the course of a few years The Polaroid Company extended its range of instant films 8 x 10” with a new transparent film called 891.

 

This particular transparency gave me the opportunity to add other textures to the original support creating new effects of almost three-dimensional images. Perhaps inspired by the beautiful Byzantine Mosaics that enriched my childhood in Ravenna, I started to work with the thinnest gold and silver leaves, which bring to the images a certain fragility and unexpected reflections creating a sort of magic mirror.

 

In the same corner of my studio, I took some nude portraits of girls. As the light flows through the window, it is not easy to describe the emotion of the moment in which my subject is there, against the wall, cut off from the rest of the world, abandoned to this strange solitude, in front of my camera with her entire life, all her beauty, sublimated by the northerly light.


Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but what is not there. Every photograph is an encounter, an intimate, reciprocal confession.”  (Paolo Roversi)