CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/26/2014

Robert Polidori: Chronophagia

"Salle d'introduction aux galeries historiques, (2) ANR.01.002, Salles du XVII, Aile du Nord – RdC, Château de Versailles, 1985" is reproduced from Robert Polidori: Chronophagia, in which psychologist David Dorenbaum writes, "The photographs of Polidori unfold in the temporality of an imaginary time. This is a psychic time organized around unconscious traces, around layers of memories. Like superimposed negatives of a photograph, most of them are only accessible to our consciousness in fragments. I keep asking myself what is the notion of time that underlies Polidori's photographs. It appears that time is a structure shared with being. Time is the object in these photographs. However, I can see that they exist in several distinct but converging temporalities. One is constituted by the temporality of the events portrayed, which is superimposed on another temporality, capable of eluding any form of measurement, by telescoping the mental categories of space and time. This is the temporality of human experience that perhaps can be made visible again.
Although I really don't know quite where it came from, I imagine that Polidori achieves this effect through a process like that of the archaeologist attempting to reconstruct a vase from shards found in the field. Through history, but also through his imagination, he is able to establish a link between incongruous events and dislocated chronologies. His photographs set in motion the dynamic forces of the unconscious, his and ours. This is how they enlarge our world: they activate in us a process of transformation of our self-perception. They make us question our impressions of what is beautiful. They make us wonder what will last and what will not. I borrow the splendid title of J.W. Dunne's book published in 1927, and think of the work of Robert Polidori as An Experiment with Time."