Best known for his photographs in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, as well as his moving "New Orleans After the Flood" show at the Met in 2006, Polidori has now been granted his first career retrospective at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal, his home town. Featuring 59 works ranging from his first photographs of evicted Bronx apartments in the early 1980s to his ongoing series of Versailles' back rooms, the show strikingly emphasizes the overarching quality his work has sustained throughout his career: the will to find nobility in ruin. The eerie neon-pink liquid covering an abandoned Chernobyl plant, for example, finds a strangely beautiful echo in Havana's desolate yet brightly-colored luxury interiors.

Further uniting the works, the curators had the courage to mount the images on glassless wooden frames, giving the touchable, degradable photographs the same aura of impermanence as the scenes they depict. Polidori has described the interiors he captures as "both metaphors and catalysts for states of being," and seeing this show is a superb avenue to realize that while our states of being might be moldy, untended, or even on the verge of total collapse, they retain--or even gain--an uncanny, beautiful mystery. Perhaps the human condition isn't so doomed after all.

Robert Polidori's 5323 St. Anthony Avenue, New Orleans, September" (2005). ; Courtesy of Nicolas Metivier Gallery

Robert Polidori's "Unit 4 Control Room, Chernobyl" (2001). ; Courtesy of Nicolas Metivier Gallery

Robert Polidori's "Senora Luisa Faxas Residence, 2 #318 (at the corner of Avenida 5ta.), Miramar" (1997). ; Courtesy of Nicolas Metivier Gallery