I bet (almost) everyone working in fashion can recognize a Paolo Roversi photograph the moment they see one. But what makes his images so special and unique? (Spoiler: it’s the light)

Non ho mai ragionato con la luce. (I have never reasoned with light.)

Con la luce non si ragiona. (One cannot reason with light.)

Con la luce si può parlare. (One can only speak with it.)

La luce è un sentimento. (Light is a feeling.)

E’ come una specie di febbre che ti prende (It is like a kind of fever that comes over you)

e con cui ti alimenti.1 (and by which you are sustained.)

Even Roversi’s words, like his photographs, are poetic…

[…] ma per me il tempo in fotografia non è un passato. (…but for me, photography does not hold the past.)

Il tempo fotografico è un presente. (It holds the present.)

E’ un presente continuo. (A present that continues.)

Per me la fotografia è una piccola eternità.2 (For me, photography is a small eternity.)

DISCLAIMER

This isn’t a finished piece of research, but rather an initial framework – designed to support, inform and inspire your own work and studies as they develop further.

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READ (online)

‘L’alchimista felice’ by Harper’s Bazaar Italia

“Paolo removes the film from the photograph as a painter would lift the veil from a canvas on an easel, except that he cannot be certain what he will find. In time, that aesthetic of the discarded and the backstage—made up of blurred contours, transfigured colors, and excessive contrasts—became his distinctive visual signature.”3

→ Full article online and issue No. 29

READ (offline)

‘Lettres sur la lumière’ by Paolo Roversi & Emanuele Coccia

“He knows that some people have a natural radiance. There is a kind of beauty that comes from deep within a person and rises to the surface of the skin. This rare beauty—one that cosmetics tend to diminish rather than enhance—is exactly what Paolo’s lighting is meant to reveal.”4

Foreword by Erri de Luca

→ Italian version available here

WATCH

Hetty Mahlich on the phone with Paolo Roversi

“I like when I take a picture of my subject, not an addition but a subtraction—and to take away. All of the things around are not interesting for me. I can isolate my subject completely from the rest of the world, and to let my subject become the centre of the world.”

→ If you speak Italian, THIS documentary is a must-see!

VISIT

Galleria Paolo Roversi in Ravenna

→ New permanent exhibition space at MAR (Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna)

EXPLORE

Paolo Roversi at the Palais Galleria

Unfortunately, you can no longer visit this 2024 exhibition in person, but you can still explore the videos and its exhibition catalogue:

→ You can find the catalogue of the exhibition HERE

COLLECT

A numbered copy of ‘IMAGES’ (Steidl, 1999) by Carla Sozzani

She described it in the following words:

“These photographs document the creative trajectory, the affinity of choices, and the great personal friendship between Nino Cerruti and Paolo Roversi.”5

→ Purchased from HAUTE RENOMMEE ARCHIVE

It’s hard to find the right words to describe a living legend, so I prefer to give the word to philosopher Emanuele Coccia:

“If Carla Sozzani’s life is so intimately linked to photography and its history, it is because all her work – as curator, editor, writer and entrepreneur – has been a constant invention and reinvention of this other frequency of the world, in which the most beautiful things manage, for a moment, to become simultaneous. This is what she did, starting in the 1980s, when she revolutionized magazines, which from simple repertories of clothes and forms became a kind of sublime collection in which every human artefact – furniture, objects, landscapes, bodies, architectures – can be summoned on the same page and measured according to a single criterion: the capacity to inhabit this quasi-eternity.

The same project inspired 10 Corso Como, which transformed the paper museum of the magazine into a true space of life in which life itself tried to become eternal, and to feed on all the surrounding light. And it is this same spirit that now animates the Sozzani Foundation, at once laboratory, the atelier of the artist Kris Ruhs, a space for study and for exhibition.”1

DISCLAIMER

This isn’t a finished piece of research, but rather an initial framework – designed to support, inform and inspire your own work and studies as they develop further.

Subscribe now

READ (online)

‘What was your big break?’ from System magazine

“I remember being on holiday with a friend in Sardinia in 1968, when my father sent me a telegram, saying, ‘You’re behaving like a spoiled child! Come back and study or go to work!’ So I came home and started work for a friend of my mother, who had a chain of specialist magazines: children, knitwear, haute couture, cuisine, brides, clothing patterns.”2

Full article online and in issue No. 14.

READ (offline)

‘Carla Sozzani: Art, Life, Fashion’ by Louise Baring

“I was raised with two maxims dictated by my father: never say ‘I’m tired’ and never say ‘I don’t have time.’”3

→ Easy to read and full of beautiful photos from Sozzani’s personal archive

LISTEN TO

Italian podcast Parola Progetto by Paolo Ferrarini

→ If you don’t understand Italian, I suggest watching the video podcast ‘Archive Talks’ with subtitles

WATCH

Carla Sozzani taking you into her mind & her closet

“Editing has always been a very important part of my life. I...] Our life is about editing anyway. We have to make choices every day on everything.”

VISIT

Fondazione Sozzani in Milano

→ Especially during Design Week or Fashion Week

WORDS TO REMEMBER

Carla Sozzani used to say:

“[…] research is another name for curiosity, with a bit of discipline on top.”4