Unless you’ve been paying close attention to fashion magazines such as W, i-D, Luncheon, and Vogue in all its international editions over the past few decades, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen Paolo Roversi’s photography. But in those pages he has been a singularly sophisticated and striking presence; at a time when many of his most famous peers in fashion photography are either dead or cancelled, Roversi, at seventy-eight, remains an active master of the genre. His work has come into sharper focus recently, with an exhibition last spring at the Palais Galliera, in Paris, and another recent show at the Pace gallery, in New York. A catalogue for the Paris show, titled simply “Paolo Roversi,” is a good place to discover the artist, though his best work is so vibrant that it can’t be confined to the page or the wall.

Kate, New York, 1993.Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Audrey Tchekova, dress by Atsuro Tayama, Spring-Summer 1999, Paris, 1998 (Max Mixt(e), Spring 1999).

Largely self-taught, the Italian-born, Paris-based Roversi has been working regularly since the early nineteen-eighties. He’s survived because he’s always emphasized the art in commerce. Like Irving Penn in his later years, Roversi is especially inspired by avant-garde designers, including John Galliano, Romeo Gigli, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons. His views of their unconventional garments are painterly and romantic—expressionist evocations rather than detailed transcriptions of the clothes. Shown alongside his fashion work are portraits and nudes, often featuring the same models he’s already photographed fully dressed. These pictures are frank, usually frontal, and remarkably tender, recalling Julia Margaret Cameron’s soft-focus, sepia-toned images of friends and relatives from the Victorian era. There’s an intimacy and sensitivity to Roversi’s work that never feels exploitative. The body is always an extension of a portrait, not an isolated sculptural form.

Sasha Robertson for Yohji Yamamoto, Autumn-Winter 1985-1986, Paris, 1985.

Tami Williams, dress by Christian Dior, Autumn-Winter 1949-1950, Paris, 2016.

Molly Bair, Chanel dress from the Spring-Summer 2015 haute-couture collection, Paris, 2015 (Vogue Italia, March 2015).

Kirsten Owen for Romeo Gigli, Summer 1988, London, 1987. Original Polaroid.

Two of the influences that Roversi is quick to note are Man Ray and Erwin Blumenfeld, both of whom worked in and out of mid-century fashion magazines and were famous for their manipulation of images in the darkroom. Their processes—which involved adjusting tones and colors, as well as doubling, elongating, or solarizing images—gave their photographs a sharp, often startling edge. Roversi works almost exclusively with Polaroid, both in color and in black-and-white, and his edge tends to be softer, with the diffuse glow of an Impressionist painting. Polaroid encourages an experimental approach to both the material and the resulting image. Like William Klein’s pictures, Roversi’s incorporate accidents, light flares, blur, even damage. No matter how flat the results might appear in print, they have a materiality that can’t be pinned down to one dimension. Roversi’s best fashion pictures feel unresolved, alive—as if they’re still coming together before our eyes.

Luca Biggs for Alexander McQueen, Autumn-Winter 2021-2022, Paris, 2021.

Roversi grounds his constantly evolving methods in photographic tradition by working primarily in a studio in Paris that he’s occupied for most of his career. For a 1995 fashion shoot in a Paris park, he brought along a fabric backdrop, creating an open-air enclosure that recalled the portable studios that Penn devised for his “Worlds in a Small Room” series of ethnographic portraits in Dahomey, Nepal, Morocco, and other far-flung locations. Like Penn, though, Roversi generally prefers to work in a more familiar and settled space. In the exhibition catalogue, which features a series of conversations with the Paris exhibition’s curator, Sylvie Lécallier, Roversi says, “I need to be kind of shut away in a room. I need to be hemmed in.” Several of the most striking photographs in the book are of the studio itself, which appears empty except for a pair of high heels reflected in a wall of mirrors or a rumpled military blanket, a favorite backdrop, pinned to a bare wall.

Jerome Clark, Paris, 2005 (Uomo Vogue, February 2006).

Light, Paris, 2002.

For Roversi, the studio is “like an empty stage, a space waiting to be filled, a time yet to be invented, where neither seasons, nor days, nor hours exist.” He is clearly caught up in the romance of photography, from the surprise and discovery of its formative years to the most challenging experiments of his fellow-artists, and his work has a terrific sense both of the moment and the days, years, and decades that led up to it. He pushes the Polaroid process to make the pictures that he can only imagine until they explode into life in his darkroom. “Every step forward, every evolution of my work, was the result of an accident,” Roversi told Lécallier. Cameron, Blumenfeld, and Penn are hovering nearby, kibbitzing, gossiping, wondering how it will all come out. Nothing is certain, which makes the creation of a great photograph all the more extraordinary.

Audrey Marnay for Comme des Garçons, Spring-Summer 1997, Paris, 1996.

These photographs are drawn from “Paolo Roversi.”