Collection
Versailles Series
Robert Polidori
Description of the work
- Media Print
- Location LOTTE HOTEL SEOUL Executive Tower Lobby
Robert Polidori started shooting the restoration process of the Palace of Versailles since the early 1980s, and has documented the changes over a period of more than 30 years. The Versailles series is representative of the photographer’s work, which focuses on human history that has accrued to architectural spaces. Polidori captures the historic restoration of Versailles using a wide-angle camera at slow shutter speeds, thereby saturating the image with beauty, tranquility, and a meditative quality, together with a rare clarity and focus. This series of photographs is displayed in a quintessentially “LOTTE-like” space, on the 1st floor of the LOTTE HOTEL SEOUL Executive Tower, thoroughly renovated and reopened in 2018. As is well known, the name of the corporation, LOTTE, is derived from the name “Charlotte,” the heroine of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” Mindful of such associations, this space is designed to echo the scenes in the novel with Baroque-style elements and classical photographic images of Versailles, in order to create the illusion of being in a banquet hall in a palace in Europe for guests visiting the hotel.
About the author
Robert Polidori is a photographer whose works capture the juxtaposition of past and present. He started to photograph Versailles in earnest after moving to Paris in 1983. The “Versailles” series, documenting the restoration of Versailles over a span of more than 30 years, is perhaps the most famous example of his oeuvre, which attempts to throw a light on architectural spaces imbued with human history. He won the World Press Photo Award (1998) in Arts and Entertainment, and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award (1999 and 2002) for architectural photography. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum. Polidori’s photographs are held in major art museums around the world, including the Palace of Versailles in France, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Victoria&Albert Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, as well as the National Library of France and university museums in Princeton University, Yale University and New York University.
Robert Polidori (b. 1951, Canada)
M.A., Film, State University of New York, Buffalo
