Studio

Studio features nearly two decades of Paolo Roversi’s hugely influential studio portraiture. Within the confines of his Paris studio, Roversi photographs subjects in 8x10 Polaroid format, often allowing his images to fade before fixing them to their substrate. His long exposures at close range harness an aesthetic from the earliest days of studio photography, but with a renewed urgency that wavers somewhere between history and apparition. Stripped of the usual accoutrements of studio portraiture, Roversi’s subjects push back with a vulnerable intensity that reveals as much of the photographer as of the model. The images collected here function not only as a series of individual portraits, but also as a collective self-portrait of the artist and the place that stands at the center of his work.