From 20 June 2026, the MOP Foundation in A Coruña (Spain) is dedicating a major exhibition to Paolo Roversi. Entitled Doubts, it brings together images made over more than forty years of practice, alongside a body of previously unseen photographs.
Based in Paris since the late 1970s, Roversi occupies a singular place in the history of fashion photography. At a time when this field progressively freed itself from its commercial function to become a terrain of visual experimentation, he developed a personal language grounded in slowness and the pursuit of form. Since those years, fashion photography has indeed constituted an unprecedented space of freedom, welcoming approaches as diverse as those of Guy Bourdin, Deborah Turbeville, Sarah Moon and Helmut Newton. Paolo Roversi belongs to this history while distinguishing himself within it, by paying particular attention to the processes through which an image disappears and emerges.
Although he readily defines himself as a craftsman, his work has left its mark on the aesthetic of the great magazines and fashion houses. Many designers have given him complete creative freedom, aware of his capacity to shift the codes of fashion imagery towards more ambiguous and more open territories.
Like Irving Penn before him, Roversi remains attached to the studio. “Everyone brings with them their own emotional state, which must be channelled in order to create a beautiful photograph. My studio is an empty stage waiting to be filled, a time yet to be invented where neither days, nor seasons, nor hours exist.” he explains. The photographer describes it as a shadow theatre. In this space deliberately withdrawn from the outside world, he experiments with the effects of blur, overexposure, chemical accidents and extended exposure times. For him, “doubt constitutes an open door onto creativity and imagination, while certainty closes that door.”
The exhibition is organised around several thematic spaces — Theatre, Appearances, Shadows, Doubts, People, Presence, Grace, Beauty and Erasure which illuminate the different dimensions of his practice. Particularly notable is his recurrent use of Polaroid, whose material properties and possibilities for transformation have accompanied much of his research.
Roversi also lays claim to a deep knowledge of the history of the medium. He readily cites Robert Frank, August Sander and Erwin Blumenfeld among his references, while sharing with Julia Margaret Cameron the conviction that a photograph finds its purpose in its intensity. An image succeeds when it is beautiful, not when it is sharp.
Jean-Jacques Ader
The exhibition Doubts by Paolo Roversi will open at the MOP Foundation, Muelle de Batería, in A Coruña, on 20 June 2026 and will run through September 2026. A beautiful publication will be released to coincide with the opening.
