Elegantly Wasted: Award-Winning Photographer Robert Polidori Finds Beauty In Disaster

It began, 25 years ago, with a series of pictures of New York apartment interiors. An estate agent had described to me how the occupants of three apartments of one Lower East Side building had all happened to die within a two-week period. During an inspection he had discovered that the apartments had been systematically ravaged by thrill-seeking adolescents... learn more

Christmas Books 2014: Best Photography And Art Books To Read

Christmas Books 2014: Best Photography And Art Books To Read

Christmas Books 2014: Best Photography And Art Books To Read

The photographer Robert Polidori has spent 28 years capturing cultural spaces and crumbling cities throughout the world. In Chronophagia(Steidl, €38) the palace of Versailles, the rooms and streets of Havana, New York tenements and shelled buildings in Beirut are just some of the structures on which he lavishes his attention. His eye for colour and the terrible poetry of urban decay is always impeccable... learn more

Photos From The Archive: Robert Polidori’s Havana

In the January 26, 1998 issue of the magazine, Paul Goldberger reported on the declining state of Havana’s architectural heritage, as well as on the Cuban preservationists who were attempting to salvage it. Robert Polidori, The New Yorker’s staff photographer at the time, accompanied Goldberger to Cuba. The two men travelled around Havana in a red-and-white 1953 Chevrolet and knocked on the doors of the city’s crumbling mansions. Polidori’s photographs of the buildings’ interiors, which he shot with a large-format camera, are vivid depictions of Goldberger’s observation that decay had not yet destroyed the “majestic presence” of Havana’s grand villas... learn more