He has documented numerous sites around the world, creating large format and highly detailed colour photographs of places marked by the imprint of past and present lives. Polidori’s images reflect on the notions of memory and history embedded in architecture.

‘The most interesting things are always behind us. I look at everything as archaeology. Where you point the camera is the question and the picture you get is the answer to decipher. My belief is that you should take stills of what doesn’t seem to move and take movies or videos of [what] does.’

After graduating with an MA in Film from State University of New York, Buffalo, Polidori moved to the United States as a child and began his career in avant-garde cinema by assisting Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, an experience that critically shaped his approach to photography, based on ideas of temporality and stillness. While living in Paris in the early 1980s, he began documenting the restoration of the Château de Versailles and continued for a period of 30 years to photograph the ongoing changes to its interior. He continued to photograph the crumbling majesty of the palaces of Havana, Cuba; the deserted ruins of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Pripyat and Chernobyl. In 2005, he travelled to New Orleans to record the abandoned homes and devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, with works from the series displayed in his 2006 solo exhibition After the Flood at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. His bodies of photographic work have been the subject of more than 15 books published by Steidl. Polidori’s 2010 series of photographs Fra Angelico / Opus Operantis, exhibited in 2019 at Flowers, focuses on the frescoed interiors restored in the 15th-century Convent of San Marco by Italian early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico. The photographs delve into the psychological structure of the rooms, exploring a connection between the peaceful interior spaces of the monks’ cells and the spiritual charge of Fra Angelico’s amazing masterpieces depicting the life of Christ, designed to enhance meditation and prayer.

His current work deals with population and urban growth through photographing “dendritic” cities around the world, including Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Amman.