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Conversation with fashion photographer Paolo Roversi
05.06.2023
Monday, June 5, 6:30pm
Grand Salon, Villa Medici
Event in Italian and French
Event free of charge, booking essential
We kindly ask you to cancel your reservation if you no longer wish to attend, in order to give others the opportunity to take part in the event.
On Monday June 5 at 6:30 pm, renowned fashion photographer and portraitist Paolo Roversi will discuss his various influences, his attachment to the Polaroid and his mastery of mise-en-scène, in the Grand Salon of Villa Medici. The conversation will be moderated by Cordélia de Brosses.
Paolo Roversi’s photography drawsinspiration from art, literature and film. He will discuss some of these (Italian painting, in particular Giorgio Morandi and the Renaissance, or Byzantine art) in a free conversation.
The discussion will also focus on the photographer’s art of staging, as he creates a world of his own in his studio, where time is suspended. His work as anauthor andpublisher will also be discussed, as will his passion for the poetry of Petrarch, Leopardi and Montale. This exchange will also be an opportunity to revisit Roversi’s deep attachment to the Polaroid camera, which he discovered in the 1980s, and which would become his trademark.
Paolo Roversi, the most Parisian of Italians, is both an icon of photography and fashion and a secretive man who likes to remain in the shadows; in short: one of the legendary photographers by whom all the world’s stars dream of being photographed.
Paolo Roversi
Paolo Roversi is a fashion and portrait photographer born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1947.
As a child, he learned photography on his own, then trained with a photographer in Ravenna. As a teenager, he developed a passion for the poetry of Petrarch, Leopardi and Eugenio Montale, as well as for contemporary authors such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, whom he met.
In 1968, as a student in Bologna, he took courses with Umberto Eco and opened a photography studio in a cellar. After working for the Associated Press, he moved to Paris on the advice of Peter Knapp, artistic director of Elle.
His fame grew in the 1980s, when he was one of the first to adopt the 20×25 Polaroid back, which “magically reveals the image after just one minute”, a technique that gradually disappeared from his practice afterwards.
As a freelance photographer, he collaborated with major fashion magazines such as Elle, British Vogue and Marie Claire, and photographed the great models of the 20th century, including Kate Moss, Laetitia Casta, Isabella Rossellini and Natalia Vodianova.
Cover image: Kate, London 2015 © Paolo Roversi
Portrait of Paolo Roversi: © Myles Kalus Anak Jihem
