Until July 14, 2024, the Paolo Roversi show at Palais Galliera features images taken over the course of a 50-year career.
Fate can be a strange mechanism. In November 1973, the young budding Italian photographer Paolo Roversi left his native Ravenna and went to Paris. There his friend, the stylist Popy Moreni, introduced him to the world of fashion.
Notably, he went to the studio of one of his early idols, Guy Bourdin, hoping to become his assistant. Bourdin, somewhat remarkably, asked Roversi what his astrological sign might be. “Libra,” Roversi told him. “I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible … ” Bourdin replied.
No sooner had Bourdin rejected him than Roversi wrote to Helmut Newton asking to be his personal assistant. Newton wrote back declaring that Roversi’s photographs were “too good” and that he was overqualified to become his assistant.
And then, by chance, in a hotel room in Paris in 1983 he met a Japanese designer who presented sweaters with big holes, broken fabrics and textiles with no shape at all. She was Rei Kawakubo and her brand was Comme des Garçons. “My collaboration with Rei Kawakubo goes back a long time and each time working with her is a new inspiring adventure,” Roversi says. It’s one that’s still going strong 41 years later.
Paolo Roversi may be the world’s most progressive and renowned fashion photographer you’ve never heard of, except for one rather important detail. He’s not a fashion photographer per se – or rather he is (having shot with Yohji Yamamoto, Valentino, Cerruti, Romeo Gigli, Dior Beauty and Chanel), but that’s not where his visual priorities lie. This is a man who’s photographed the likes of Kate Middleton, Tilda Swinton, John Galliano (Roversi’s portrait of Galliano sits on the designer’s desk and is the first thing the couturier acknowledges every morning), Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss (both naked), Natalia Vodianova and Monica Bellucci (who says shooting with Roversi is “spiritual”). But unlike his lofty photographic fashion peers – Avedon, Newton, Penn, Meisel and Bourdin among them – Roversi turns the women he shoots into saintly, ethereal and almost abstract figures, who appear and disappear as reflections of a photographic elsewhere.
Roversi has never succumbed to the “sex-sells” notion of fashion, instead seeming to have developed a resistance to delivering easy – or lazy, complacent – sensuality. And yet his work is still suffused with something of the intensely erotic, which also manages to be simultaneously angelic. Mystical, religious, evocative, old-world, Old Masterly even, his vibe is a mix of Belgian painter Michael Borremans, Italian pot-supremo Giorgio Morandi and Manchester’s contemporary vanguardianess of light, Louise Giovanelli.
“Mixing different periods of his work brings out the timeless character of his photographs,” explains Sylvie Lécallier, curator of Roversi’s current show at the Palais Galliera in Paris. “Some of the pictures look like they could have been taken in the 19th century, others now. And the fact that his images are so hard to date is a real paradox in the context of fashion.”
Not unlike Kawakubo, who describes her own work thus: “The modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion … imbalance unfinished … elimination and absence of intent [she might have been describing Roversi’s images].” His work after all, feels purposefully indistinct, or liminal subliminal. “There are so many thoughts and so many dreams in her dresses,” Roversi says. “They’re not empty at all; they’re full of many, many meanings.”
A lovely irony of the Roversi narrative is that his being an abstract fashion photographer sans pareil also happened more by accident than design, given his close relationship with Polaroid, from which he was almost inseparable for 30 years. Roversi even coined his own relationship with a new semantic vernacular: Paoloroid. It’s always been a private joke that his birth coincided with that of Polaroid (1940) and that they both came together in 1980.
But in a reverse, or counter-Polaroid spirit, Roversi’s innovation was that he tried to nullify the very two selling points that made Polaroid so appealing: its processing speed and the absence of any need for user input. So Roversi stretched out the time involved and experimented with process, in a slower, more meditative rhythm.
“Every print is a one-off; it’s both a proof and the definitive work,” he says. “The camera is its own darkroom, but it gives you no chance to control or retouch the work.” He goes on to explain that accidents are frequent – as are surprises. “After every shot with a Polaroid,” he recalls, he was always apprehensive. “There’s a minute during which you pray.”
Roversi’s images have been pioneering in that they so eloquently bridge the spheres of commercial photography and fine art. He’s a fan of the 19th-century portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron, famous for melancholic female faces, and Diane Airbus, champion of the marginals and freaks.
“I like ambiguity, and I walk the line that separates the masculine and the feminine, and shadow and light, looking for beauty,” he says. “I find it, I lose it, I approach it, then I step away. To my eyes, beauty remains mysterious, and I like it that way.”
This article was first published in Prestige Hong Kong