That shruggingly modest nonchalance is typical of Roversi, who is of course a revered imagemaker—yet it’s certainly true that his star shines brightest outside of the US. “Along the Way” reveals a body of work so quintessentially European that it could only have sprung from the land which gave us Nadar, Brassai, and Man Ray. (Okay, okay: I know Man Ray was American, but Paris was absolutely his aesthetic and spiritual home in much the same way Roversi, who hails from Ravenna, Italy, adopted the city as his, too.) Then again, perhaps the US wasn’t exactly in his sights after the advice he was given by photographer Guy Bourdin, who once told Roversi: “Don’t go to work in New York—it’s the cemetery of photography.” Roversi laughed. “His words,” he continued, “not mine.”
The specifically American mindset of mining creativity for its commercial value was clearly not to Bourdin’s liking, and maybe it wasn’t too much to Roversi’s either. (“I’ve mostly worked for European magazines,” he said, a situation which is more a case of your loss, not mine.) Yet his work does demand greater attention. It doesn’t trade in uncomplicated directness or immediacy: Its point is to capture you with its beauty, and then let that beauty haunt your mind. Roversi has also never been much interested in playing the star to further his career. “It’s not really my character,” he said, “I’m more of a private person. I like to work in my studio, in the corner.”
Paolo Roversi, Jerome, Studio Luce, Paris, December 5th, 2005. © Paolo Roversi, courtesy Pace Gallery.
© Paolo Roversi, courtesy Pace Gallery
