MILAN — Celebrated across continents with major retrospectives and solo shows and based in Paris since 1973, Italian photographer Paolo Roversi is finally headed back home — metaphorically, with the unveiling of a permanent gallery in his hometown of Ravenna.
“It’s so great to be back after 50 years of [self] ‘exile,’ especially with such an important recognition,” Roversi told WWD with a chuckle in an interview this week.
“Ravenna is my home. Although I’ve been living in Paris for over 50 years, I feel I belong to this city, where I’ve spent my entire childhood and teenage years and that is so profoundly rooted in me,” he said.
Roversi’s elegiac style was inspired by the Byzantine architecture and cultural backdrop of his hometown as well as the work of August Sander, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus.
“Ravenna has always held a place in my heart and its identity trickled down into my work. It was never an intentional choice, but rather a subconscious process, informed by the memories and reminiscences of that place,” Roversi said.
Using large-format Polaroid film and primarily shooting in his Paris studio, Roversi’s dream-like and imaginative compositions have been able to transcend time.
After a family trip in 1964, Roversi built a darkroom in his basement and began his career a few years later with the Associated Press. By 1973, he had moved to Paris, where he assisted the British photographer Lawrence Sackmann. Jobs for Elle, Depeche Mode and Dior followed, as did ad campaigns for Cerruti, Comme des Garçons, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino and more.
The Paolo Roversi Gallery — officially opening Wednesday at the Art Museum of the City of Ravenna, known as Mar — is the result of a collaboration among the cultural institution, the Municipality of Ravenna and its Department of Culture. It builds on an exhibit hosted by the museum between 2020 and 2021 titled “Paolo Roversi – Studio Luce.”
Sanjia, Paris 2024 by Paolo Roversi
Courtesy of Mar
Located on the top floor of the museum, the gallery was curated by Chiara Bardelli Nonino who, Roversi said, realized how much the city reflects the photographer’s work. “I resemble Ravenna, rather than the city resembling me,” he said.
The space was designed by longtime Roversi collaborator Ania Martchenko, who has previously helped the maestro, as he is known, for the set design of the retrospective “Paolo Roversi,” held in 2024 at the Palais Galliera in Paris.
“She excels at translating my work and my world into space,” Roversi said.
The Gallery at the Mar is organized around three rooms, preceded by a hallway where portraits of Kate Moss, Stella Tennant and Natalia Vodianova are hung on the walls.
The first room, the Studio, is a recreation of the photographer’s famous atelier on Rue Paul Fort in Paris, known as Studio Luce, where fashion pictures, still-life imagery, portraits coexist as a kaleidoscopic trip inside Roversi’s oeuvre and intimate workspace. The exhibit also displays shots of his Parisian studio and actual equipment, including the Deardorff camera.
“I’ve always worked in domestic spaces. First at home and then at studios. They looked and felt like home, imbued with familiarity and conviviality, where lunch is sacred, where friendships blossoms and where I feel at ease and comfortable,” he said.
Paolo Roversi
Courtesy of Mar
That space opens on two adjoining rooms, the Archive, with cardboard walls and a long table, and the Muses’ room, where portraits of Naomi Campbell, actress Golshifteh Farahani, Rihanna and her daughter Stella, among other A-listers, are set against textile-covered walls.
Bardelli Nonino avoided arranging pictures in chronological order and instead recreated “a walk through my career, picking the most interesting works,” Roversi said. “She didn’t want too many celebrities or too obvious pictures. The exhibit is more about reviving my [forgotten] shots,” he said.
The selection includes the “light painting” series realized by Roversi for Comme des Garçons in 1996, starring Audrey Marnay; the “white nudes” featuring Shalom Harlow, Amber Valletta, Kirsten Owen and Devon Aoki; four pictures featuring vintage Christian Dior dresses created by the founder himself, and a shot of Italian actress Isabella Rossellini taken at the Chelsea Hotel in 1992, among others.
These and many other pictures tell the story of exceptional encounters, Roversi said.
“Many personalities have helped enrich my photographic vocabulary, from Azzedine Alaia to Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, to name just a few. All of them taught me something,” he said.
“Archives are alive. Every time I go back to old pictures and open a box full of them, I always discover something new, some that I had never really considered and others that I had forgotten,” Roversi said. “It’s a treasure trove, which I safeguard. It’s like a garden continuously blossoming with new flowers,” he said.
The photographer has been praised for the consistency of his work across a 50-year-plus career where the notion and depiction of elegance and femininity has changed significantly, sometimes through Roversi’s own lens, too, for example when helping the careers of top models like Moss and Tennant take off with his iconic pictures.
“I’ve always kept myself distance from fashion’s ‘tourbillon’ [whirlwind] where everything is written anew every three or six months. I’ve just watched the river flow before me, resisting the urge to embrace the ‘dernière vague’ [last trend],” he said.
“The digital age’s speed and need to be quick, nimble and effective immediately has stripped the mystique and spirituality off of photography. For over 30 years I’ve worked with Polaroids and 20×25 cameras, which require a slower approach and a lot of meditation,” Roversi said. “This would at times lead me to ‘wrong images,’ with mistakes and imperfections but I’ve never wanted all the pictures to be perfectly in focus in the first place,” he said. “I’ve rather embraced setbacks and accidents as an opportunity.”
Kirsten Paris, 1990 by Paolo Roversi
Courtesy of Mar
When the Paolo Roversi Gallery opens next week, it will give the maestro an opportunity to take pride in his achievements — something he’s often chosen to downplay.
“When I visited the gallery, I thought about myself as a kid in Ravenna who left for Paris to follow his dream of photography. My biggest accomplishment is that I was able to express myself and convey my feelings,” he said. “I hope that anyone staring at my pictures will feel the same emotions I felt while shooting them. I want people to fall in love.
“When I see someone looking at my photographs getting emotions, I get emotional too,” he said. “It means I’ve really struck a chord.”
