“A picture is worth a thousand words, but talk is cheap,” says renowned Canadian-born, American-raised photographer Robert Polidori. He avoids the label of “architectural photographer”, instead preferring to focus on sociological issues visually illustrated in human space. He highlights the gap between the often utopian intentions of design and the realities of how space is put into everyday use. Getting his start in France, Polidori has released no fewer than 7 books tackling topics from the restoration of Versailles to the ruin of Chernobyl and Old Havana. Meanwhile, he jet sets around the world shooting “product shots” ranging from Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbão, Spain to the world’s first seven star hotel in Dubai. Most recently, Polidori has completed a series of shots documenting the ruins of New Orleans after the floodwaters had receded on assignment for The New Yorker.

You are often quoted using the word “habitat” to describe what you photograph. How does this equally apply to the favelas of Rio and the hotels of Las Vegas?

Habitat is a sociological term while an architectural photo is a product shot. Architectural photography renders, reveals or spotlights a building or interior in such a way as to idealize it – illustrating the way that designers or architects think they want society to see it. In that way, it’s truer to the drawings than the physical building. The reality of architecture comes later – it’s what human beings and society actually do with it. That’s why I call it habitat photography.

Now I’m doing commercial work less and less because it bores me. Plus, I don’t like architects a lot really – they’re cheap. They think photographers should pay them for the privilege of photographing their building. There’s a lack of generosity; psychologically, they’re not nice people. A lot of architects now want to be considered artists, which is backwards. They should take pride in the utility of what they’re doing. A long time ago I was an artist. Actually, now I’m better, I’m a photographer. Photographers used to take pride in making a utilitarian art. Now we’re on the cusp of being a vestigial art - one on its decline. Photography is finally hitting art status. This is what you get when you get put out to pasture – you get to be an art.

Many people are ashamed of making a utilitarian art. They forget about utility; they look down upon it. It’s a trend in foods right now. The greatest chef in the world will feed you a bone. It’s because they’re trying to be artists. It’s hypocritical. The musical equivalent of this is listening to John Cage records all day – they’re so intellectual, they’re not listenable.

Your work is well known for not shying away from the realities of the places you photograph. You don’t have construction scaffolding or materials removed from your frame; you don’t crop out temporary housing or squats. Why is this important to you?

In a time of such specialization, what’s going on in one art doesn’t relate to another. But in fact, everything is actually diffuse, plural. Plus, I like how it looks. But it’s laziness too. Everything in the world is in process; it’s not a polished final product like a fashion shot. I don’t like that fashion look. I don’t consider fashion photography an art. Fashion itself isn’t an art. Advertising is not art, but it can be artistic. It’s not yet put out to pasture. Its function is purely utilitarian.

The master that photography serves is history. If it is utilitarian – the utility it has is to provide proof. Here’s another example: the development of different media. Photography has super-prolific younger brother called cinema. Cinema takes place over time. Photography takes a place in time. It’s like the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. Light can have the properties of a wave or particle. As a particle you know where it is at a specific time. Waves have no fixed location, but a speed or frequency. Photography is the particle, cinema is more temporal. But both are functions of light.

Sometimes you have to lie to say the truth. Medium and technology have their own personality that gets in the way. When I frame, I try to do it in a comprehensive way to make certain meanings evident. You have to edit out some parts. You can’t take a picture of the whole world – it’s too big. You have to cut out something. So, there are always parts that are cut out. Sometimes due to how much room you have, or the position of light, I have to rearrange things to make the elements left in the frame coherent.

Beyond photographing new developments (product shots as you say) you are also drawn to ruin and squalor – Old Havana, Chernobyl, Beirut and most recently New Orleans. What attracts you to this subject matter?

I always say to myself, “too bad I won’t be around in 50 years to see how fucked up it’ll get."

You can’t help but being a part of the time you live in. People form my generation [the Baby Boomers] are aware we’re living in the last years of the industrial age. Younger people don’t feel that as much. I’m documenting the passing of one of the more important developmental phases that humanity has gone through - a rapid one at that. Chernobyl is a modern day Pompeii; an emblematic event. Not so much in America but more so in Europe - something seen by everyone on TV. With all the looting, I feel like it was a violation of history. To me, many of the Chernobyl shots are of room rape.

This guy in France said that I photograph what I don’t like better than what I love. Maybe this is because once you observe something, the thing you’ve observed has forever changed. Most of my best work is nothing but illustrations of desolation row; brown like my French passport.

You started your creative life in New York working with avant-garde film. You worked with Michael Snow on “Wavelength” and Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives. How did you discover your interest in architecture and habitat?

My obsession with rooms predates my obsession with buildings. A seminal book for me was “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates. It’s about ancient mnemonic systems. A lot has been written about how the quintessential shot of cinema is the shot of railroad cars approaching or receding from the camera. In fact, one of the first shots the Lumière brothers took was that. Those railways cars are metaphorical for the film frames. Likewise, the emblematic still shot is a room. The frame is a room. I liken it to the notion of first sight. Back at Antioch, I was working for Paul Sharits, the extraordinary avant-garde filmmaker, doing 4x5 slide pieces. They were stills, but with pre-sequenced timing like film - stuff that dealt with the inside of rooms called “72 murmur dip thong”. Rooms are both metaphors and catalysts for states of being and therefore a look into the soul. Every room shot is a pussy shot; a yearning for pre-natal life -consciously or unconsciously.

Did you have any particularly influential professors or photographers you studied under or worked for?

I was arrogant when I was young. I had already studied under great masters like Jonas Mekas Paul Sharits and Michael Snow. In all honesty, when I went to SUNY Buffalo, I was just going there to pick up a diploma. But, there was a professor who was well known in the geography world. He was the discoverer of the El Niño current: Dr. Charles Ebert. He was one of those teacher stars. His geography 101 classes would fill an amphitheater. The things he would make me think about have been formative for the rest of my life: the death of the industrial age, the birth of the ecological movement. The problem with industrialism is that it’s not biodegradable. He taught me how one consciousness brings us to another.

How did you get from experimental film in New York to doing your first book on the restored interiors of the Palace of Versailles in France?

A great thing in my life is music ethnology - following cultures through their music. In ’71 I was working managing evening shows at the Anthology on Lafayette. After a show I caught a concert at Electric Circus: Iggy Pop and the Stooges. I remember thinking, “This isn’t music, it’s physical education. They’re radicals, not musicians.” It was the death of rock for me. So I went off in search of new music. I became a discophile. I found new interest in Iranian and Persian music traditions and diatonic overtone singing - music from Azerbaijan. You could say that Iggy Pop converted me to Islam. So the short answer is that I ended up in Paris because I used to go get records there. A friend and I would go on ethnic record buying binges. We’d save up our money and catch the cheapest flights to Paris on Air Pakistan and drop $400 or $500 on records.

At the time, I was making money doing interior restoration in SoHo. But I eventually figured out that I’d much rather photograph the jobs than actually do them myself. I just proposed the idea to the right people and got a job following the restoration at Versailles.

What does it mean to restore? To make something that no longer exists, exist again. This is a temporal paradox. Versailles was a lesson in historical revisionism as seen through museum restoration. The museum is a reflection of a society’s superego – how a whole society views and dresses itself to see itself in the mirror. Which phases of the past we’re most attracted to are based on what we most like now. Over time these things change. In Dante’s Inferno, Tiresias the prophet was condemned to walk for eternity with his head twisted toward his back. While in life he strove to look forward to the future, in Hell he must only look backward. It’s the human condition to back into the future because we don’t remember the future - only the past.