Chiara Bardelli Nonino

A compact survey of photographer Paolo Roversi’s romantic, intense and ethereal fashion images and portraits. Born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1947, Paolo Roversi discovered photography at the age of seventeen on a family holiday. A chance meeting with photographer Peter Knapp led him to move to Paris in the early 1970s, where he first encountered the world of fashion. His career truly began when he became an assistant to Laurence Sackman, who taught him the photographer’s craft. Now based in Paris for more than thirty years, Roversi is famed for his use of large-format Polaroid film to capture images of ethereal beauty, vulnerability and romanticism. Working in evocative monochrome or carefully articulated colour, he collaborates regularly with the world’s top supermodels and designers, and has shot for many leading fashion magazines and international ad campaigns.

This is the story in pictures of a dimension of living that differs from every other. While there have been attempts to create a philosophy of interior design, there has rarely been an effort to discover the soul of furniture and objects. That is what Paolo Roversi has tried to do with his camera in these pages, which are devoted to Poliform, the Italian company that has successfully transformed ancient Italian artisanal traditions into contemporary furniture. By using what have always been his raw materials time, light, space Roversi leads us on a photographic journey to the middle of the Poliform universe, helping us to relive the company s story and capture the mysterious, unmistakable soul that makes the surfaces and volumes of its objects vibrate.