Description

Polidori's visions of Naples' abandoned churches are psychologically charged tributes to a tattered devotional past

"Is it possible to photograph a past life?" asks Canadian photographer Robert Polidori (born 1951) in his new book Unknown Prophecies, for which his alluring yet haunting subject is the abandoned churches of Naples--once glorious sites of Christian worship, today neglected and dilapidated relics. His images focus on the flaking frescoes, broken sculptures, crumbling bones and votive shrines that embody an evaporation of faith. Among these vestiges, the purgatory cult endures, a theology of intercession still murmuring in the margins of Naples' fractured sanctuaries. As always with Polidori's photos of deserted human environments, he does not simply catalog what was but instead poetically inquires into the cryptic traces that remain. These images are meditations on ghostly places where memory still clings to stone and shadow.