Robert Polidori is known for his large format photographs of habitats and rooms saturated with the traces of human intervention. In EYE and I, he turns the lens around to reveal the portraits of people he has encountered in his work of over thirty years photographing around the world, particularly in the Middle East and India. These instantaneous portraits of mutual recognition reveal the photographed subject and the photographer intersecting with each other in a fleeting gaze of mutual regard. Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of exhibitions in New York, London, Brazil, Montreal, among other places. He received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006, Polidori's series of photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bestselling books Havana (2003), Zones of Exclusion-Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003), After the Flood (2006), Parcours Museologique Revisite (2009) and Some Points in Between... Up Till Now (2010) are published by Steidl.

Following the reopening of 30 Avenue Montaigne in 2022, this exquisite volume offers a unique look into the metamorphosis of the House of Dior s legendary Parisian headquarters via images captured by acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori. or over two years, the iconic hotel particulier underwent a radical transformation, during which Polidori was granted exclusive access to the site for the entire duration of the restoration documenting the original state, the demolition phase, and the reconstruction of Dior s couture house. Registering the past, present, and future of the spaces within a single frame, Polidori s images capture layers of history in extraordinary detail. Enriched with archival documents, his impressive iconography offers an extraordinary visual experience recorded in one of the nest pieces of bookmaking, beautifully printed on luxurious European papers.

"Transitional States" is Robert Polidori's attempt to visually portray aspects of historical revisionism as seen through various stages of the restoration of the Palace of Versailles. What does it really mean to restore a room? Is it about the precise duplication of something which is now showing the wear and tear of its age, to renew it and make it again as it once was? Or does it involve entirely redefining the rooms epidermis to a completely different state, a state that it may once have had in an earlier epoch? The curatorial decisions that control this process reflect a political will and esthetic tastes which have altered over the period of the restoration. Photographed over a period of 25 years, the transient and temporary situations which the labors of these restorations afford, present temporal paradoxes that engage layers of history and power.