Robert Polidori, a Canadian American photographer, born in Montreal and currently residing in Ojai, California, is one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers of human habitats and environments. Creating meticulously detailed, large-format colour film photographs, Polidori’s images record a visual citation of both history and the present times within the confines of a single frame. Moving to New York in the late 1960s he became assistant to filmmaker Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives, which organised Polidori's first solo exhibition. While living in Paris in the early 1980s, he began documenting the restoration of Versailles, capturing the palace in a rare moment of disorder and emptiness. Since then, he has photographed the interiors of buildings in the aftermath of disasters or under siege of poverty, such as the interior of a school in Chernobyl and the facades of slums - what he calls 'dendritic cities' - on the outskirts of places like Mumbai, Rio and Amman. Polidori's photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's destruction were the subject of a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2006 and in 2012 the photographer held a joint exhibition with his mentor Jonas Mekas at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.