Robert Polidori is a
photographer known for his architectural studies and frequent contributions to magazines and books. He was born in 1951 in Montreal, Canada, to a French Canadian mother and a Corsican father. He moved to the United States when he was ten and arrived in New York in 1969, where he got a job as an assistant to a filmmaker
Jonas Mekas at the
Anthology Film Archives, producing a number of
avant-garde films in the early 1970s. In 1980 he received an M.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and subsequently turned his attention to still photography. He has been living in
Paris and
New York City since 1987. He is listed as a staff photographer with
The New Yorker magazine and makes frequent contributions to other magazines such as
Vanity Fair.
After Hurricane Katrina,
Robert Polidori went to New Orleans, where he lived years ago, to shoot photographs of the devastation for
The New Yorker. He stayed longer than first planned, then went back again and again, for weeks, taking hundreds of pictures with a large-format camera that produced wide, superbly detailed color photographs. The camera was awkward to manipulate through the wreckage and in the heat, without electricity and lights.
These are photographs, in other words, without nostalgia, as Mr. Rosenheim writes in a short introduction to Mr. Polidori's
book, "After the Flood," but with "something of the air that generations of anonymous New Orleanians had breathed in and out." They make "no attempt to excavate what went wrong in New Orleans or why the state and federal response remains even today predisposed to cronyism, gross fraud and corruption." They simply testify, as Mr. Rosenheim puts it, "to a city that care forgot."
