Molly Bair, Paris, 2015. Photo: Paolo Roversi

The show’s final section is titled “Fading,” and that is where I began my interview, asking him what he means by the word. “Everything disappears with time,” he told me in English, before switching to Italian. “Youth, beauty, love. Like Kerouac writes, ‘I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.’” I also asked him why, as with his large-scale retrospective in 2024 at Paris’s Palais Galliera, he has chosen not to organize the exhibition chronologically. He told me time doesn’t matter, and that arranging his work by date isn’t interesting to him.

Roversi was born in Ravenna in 1947, when Italy was still reeling from World War II. From his childhood bedroom on the outskirts of town, he could see the city center in the distance. Come every fall, he would watch the fog roll over the buildings. He was scared of the dark, and began to take an interest in light.

As a teenager, Roversi met a local postman named Battista Minguzzi, who taught him how to make prints. At 17, Roversi set up a makeshift darkroom in the basement of his parents’ house and printed his first photograph: a portrait of an old, wrinkled woman standing in front of a cracked church in Sicily.

“I called the print Cracks and Wrinkles,” he said. “I spent almost the whole night there printing—more contrast, less contrast. Then, toward morning, after it had dried, I took it up to my room and hung it on my wardrobe facing my bed. I contemplated this print as if I were the greatest photographer in the world.” I asked if he still has it. “Of course,” he answered.

Even “the greatest photographer in the world” needed a teacher, and for Roversi that was Nevio Natali, a photograph of whom hangs framed in Roversi’s studio. They met by chance. Roversi was a director at Modena’s Emilia Romagna Teatro in 1967, at the time pursuing a career in theater. Natali’s wife was an actress. Twenty years his elder, Natali was already the photographer-about-town, shooting everything from sports matches to weddings. Roversi spent many afternoons holed up in Natali’s studio on Via Nino Bixio, learning the basics: how to develop negatives, how to print, and, most importantly, how to measure light. “In every one of my photographs, I owe something to Nevio,” he said.

Naomi Campbell, Paris, 1996. Photo: Paolo Roversi

In 1971, Peter Knapp—the Swiss former art director of Elle magazine—was on assignment in Ravenna when he met Roversi. Two years later, in the fall of 1973, Knapp invited him to Paris. Roversi jumped at the chance, assuming he would stay only a few days, or maybe weeks. Fashion was booming in the City of Light. That November, the Battle of Versailles—the legendary charity showdown pitting five French designers against five Americans—captured the world’s attention. Moon and Deborah Turbeville were emerging, and the city had, Roversi recalled, “all the atmosphere of the 1930s, the 1950s, all the atmosphere of artistic Paris. It was still all there, in the cafés, in the exhibitions, in the galleries.”

Roversi spoke neither French nor English, but he soon decided he wasn’t going home and scraped together enough money for a studio. One day, wandering through the Galeries Lafayette, he spotted a book by Diane Arbus. It was expensive, so he tried to slip it into his jacket pocket and get past the store manager. When he was caught, he offered an unusual but resigned explanation: “I’d just never seen anything like it before.”

In 1974, he took a job with the notoriously difficult British photographer Laurence Sackman. “I worked with him for nine months,” he told me. “I broke all the records. Usually an assistant with him lasted three days, five days, then ran away.”

I asked what techniques he picked up from Sackman, given how different their work is. (Sackman’s charged, often erotic pictures are indebted to the hard-lit world of Newton and Bourdin.) The question seemed to irritate him: Sackman was religious about technique, while Roversi is not. Still, he remembered one piece of advice: “[He] used to tell me something beautiful: ‘Fix your camera firmly on the tripod, fix the tripod firmly on the ground, but keep your head and your heart free to take the photograph.’”

Following his time with Sackman, Roversi picked up small commissions for Elle and the French style magazine Depeche Mode. A Dior beauty campaign in 1980 brought him wider recognition. That same year, he began shooting in the 8-by-10 Polaroid format—using a Deardorff camera loaded with large-format film—that would become his signature. And so began his professional relationship with light. He founded Studio Luce—Italian for “Studio of Light”—where he developed his style: long shutter speeds and figures bathed in diffuse, uncertain light.

In 1981, Kawakubo was showing collections at Paris’s InterContinental hotel—clothes with holes in them, shoes with strange shapes. “Rei’s work is not fashion,” the Italian editor Carla Sozzani once said. “She is an artist expressing her art through fashion.” So was Roversi, and the two recognized a quality in each other when they began to collaborate a couple of years later. “Working with Rei opens new horizons in a way that other work does not,” he has said. “Each time, I discover something new about my work, about color, about form, about light.”

A collaboration with the designer Romeo Gigli followed in 1985. The next season, walking through London, Gigli and Roversi spotted a blonde girl playing guitar on the street. She had just arrived from Australia and was looking for money. They invited her to pose for them. Her name was Kirsten Owen, and she was 14 years old. They worked on the campaign for four days. “I wanted to capture the fragility and sensuality of women,” Gigli said.

Roversi kept at the Polaroids, but a trip to India in the late 1980s changed everything. “There I discovered the penumbra, which is this light between light and dark,” he said. “This uncertainty between light and dark fascinated me enormously.”

Back in Paris, the era of supermodels was emerging, and on his trip, Roversi had discovered a new way of photographing them. First came Kate Moss, in the early 1990s, whom he shot naked. Then Naomi Campbell, in the mid-1990s, for Italian Vogue. There was also Loulou de la Falaise, Yves Saint Laurent’s muse, and Stella Tennant, the aristocratic, androgynous Scotswoman who became one of fashion’s most indelible faces.

“They had an energy, a very particular presence, a very particular personality that was different from all the other models, from all the stereotypes,” Roversi said. “Kate and Stella were truly unique. But what is it? The way they moved? Their personality? No, not one gesture more than another. It’s an ensemble of everything—a look, a gesture, a presence. Above all, a presence. For me, what matters is presence.”

Oftentimes, when Roversi talks about presence, souls, and mystery, it’s easy to forget that many of the images he describes were created to sell dresses, handbags, and perfume. “I always say that the designer is the composer of the music, and the photographer, [who] plays the instrument, is the interpreter of the piece.”

Kirsten Owen, Paris, 1991. Photo: Paolo Roversi

Everyone wears a social mask, Roversi said, and his job is to get people to drop it, even if only for a second. “There are no rules,” he told me. “No rules of time. It can happen in seconds. You don’t need lunch or dinner or conversation.” What matters is simply that his subject trusts him, and opens their heart so he can see it.