Photo District News: Paolo Roversi

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Lighting Master

Paolo Roversi On The Mysteries of Light

ALL PHOTOS © PAOLO ROVERSI

The legendary fashion photographer talks about flashlights, sunlight and his love affair with beauty.

By Susan Reich

118 PDN MARCH 2005

“FOR ME, LIGHT IS LIFE—AND THE FIRST LIGHT THAT I see is the sun,” says Italian-born fashion photographer Paolo Roversi. “So when I think about light, I think about the sun and nothing else. Window light is the most important light for me. When I take a picture using window light, I always think about what a long trip the light is making to reach my subject.”

Speaking by phone from his home in Paris, Roversi pauses, perhaps reluctant to discuss the impulses behind his creations. His technique “is not at all rational,” he confides.

“My studio is a place for the chance, the dream, the imaginary to prevail. I give these forces as much space as I can.”

While he prefers “to be lost in the mystery of it all,” he recognizes that there is a single motive at work in his creations. “I am always in search of beauty. This I know for sure. Beauty is something that attracts me completely all of the time and pushes me far in search of something.”

In an industry that has glamorized grunge, misogyny and heroin chic, Roversi’s reverence for his female muses has remained a constant. His images have been described as “romantic,” “tender,” “ethereal,” “erotic” and “exquisitely beautiful.” His work has appeared internationally in every significant fashion magazine including Harper’s Bazaar; French, British and Italian Vogue; Interview; Arena; ID and W, and in

13-foot-wide x 16-foot-long brown cotton backdrop

Arri 4,000-watt HMI fresnel.

Full power

Model, 10 feet away from backdrop

10-foot-wide x 6.5-foot-high white foamcore reflecting panel

Arri 1,000-watt HMI fresnel with Lee #156 chocolate filter

Deardorff 8 x 10 portrait camera with Polaroid back and Goerz Golden Dagor 14-inch lens set at f/6.3

ALL DIAGRAMS © DAZZA

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W, APRIL 2004 Roversi’s name has long been synonymous with romance. With the words “Romance Returns” emblazoned in one-inch high letters across model Gemma Ward, this cover was the opening image for a fashion editorial entitled “Painted Ladies.”

The image was exposed on 8 x 10 Polaroid film—one of Roversi's signature techniques.

Roversi placed his subject about 10 feet in front of a brown cotton backdrop and lit the backdrop with an Arri 1,000-watt tungsten fresnel with a Lee #156 chocolate gel.

He keyed his model with an Arri 4,000-watt HMI fresnel, placed at the front of the set on camera left. He bounced the HMI into a 10-foot wide by 6.5-foot high white foamcore panel placed behind the camera on camera left.

Roversi exposed the image for half a second on Polaroid 809 film with a Deardorff 8 x 10 Portrait Camera and a Goerz Golden Dagor 14-inch lens set at f/6.3.

ad campaigns for Giorgio Armani, Cerutti, Comme des Garçons, Christian Dior, Alberta Ferretti, Romeo Gigli, Givenchy, Krizia, Yves Saint Laurent and Yohji Yamamoto. These assignments have transcended fashion to become art.

Roversi says he can recall a seminal experience during a family holiday in Spain, when he idly picked up a camera and started taking snapshots.

When the teenaged Roversi returned home, he set up a shared darkroom with another amateur photo enthusiast—the neighborhood postman—and began developing his own images.

“Photography attracted me little by little,” he comments now. “For me it is a kind of mysterious, voodoolike medium—something that is about witches, about time, about death. There is something magical about it, you know? In the beginning, I had the feeling that, with my camera, I could see beyond what was in front of me. Today, it is the same. When I take a picture, it is an emotion, an apparition, a rev-

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Lighting Master

elation—a little hope.”

Roversi’s first professional assignment, at the age of 20, was in 1967 as a news photographer for the Italian bureau of the Associated Press.

“I covered the funeral of Ezra Pound, the famous poet,” he muses. “It was a very sad but sweet moment, because I knew his poems, of course. It was a gray day, very rainy, and the funeral was at the cemetery, with just a few people present at his graveside.”

To augment his modest income as an AP photographer, Roversi opened a small portrait studio in Ravenna, where he photographed local families and dignitaries.

But fashion photography had already begun to exert its inexorable pull.

“I’d met some people working in fashion, and I had started to look at fashion magazines,” he recalls. “I was fascinated by the images in these magazines because they were very creative. I was very excited to discover the work of photographers such as Avedon and Penn in New York—or Bailey and Donovan in England. I was so stimulated by their creativity.”

In 1971, at the age of 24, Roversi met Peter Knapp, the renowned Elle art director. Knapp invited Roversi to come visit him in Paris.

When Roversi took him up on the offer a year later, the visit marked a turning point in his life.

“I went to Paris for two weeks and I never went home,” says Roversi. “I don't know why. I never made a decision to stay. It just happened.”

Soon after his arrival, Roversi began working for the Huppert photo-news agency. By 1973, he had signed on as an assistant in the studio of British fashion photographer Lawrence Sachmann.

His tenure with Sachmann was short—only nine months—but rich in experience. “Sachmann was very difficult,” he told a reporter for The Australian in an interview in the Nineties. “Most assistants only lasted a week before running away. But he taught me everything I needed to know to become a professional photographer.

Sachmann taught me creativity. He always used to say ‘Your tripod must be well-fixed but your eyes and mind should be free.’”

When Roversi struck out on his own, he began shooting for Elle and other magazines. A major fashion story for Marie Claire brought him wider acclaim. Before the Seventies were out, he was shooting for major fashion houses such as Christian Dior.

In 1980, when Polaroid Corporation released its new, instant 8 x 10 film, Roversi found his medium.

Since those early days, Roversi has worked primarily with largeformat Polaroid film—using continuous sources, long exposure times and rich, often unusual colors in a way that challenge our preconceptions about the boundaries between photography and painting, commerce and art.

PDN: You never use strobe to illuminate your images. Why is that?

Paolo Roversi: I like longer exposures because, in general, my photography is about portraits. I even consider my nudes to be portraits. The eyes are very important in every portrait. I can’t explain technically why the look of the subject is more deep, more touching, more human if the photographer uses a long exposure for the shot, but it is. I learned this from studying early photographs, when the photographers were obliged to use longer exposures. The portraits looked much deeper.

PDN: So what types of lighting sources do you use?

Roversi: I work primarily with HMI lights, Mag-Lite® flashlights and window light.

PDN: Do you have a favorite?

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Roversi: Window light. For me, it is the basis of everything. As Nadar said many years ago, at the beginning of photography, “Everyone can learn the technique of lighting. What is very difficult, and what you can’t teach is a feeling for the light, a sentiment of the light.”

Lighting is, above all, not a question of technique, but of the feeling. Because, even if you think it is a simple light, it depends on where you put the camera, where you put the subject, what you put behind the subject or beside the subject, the angle of the sun, if there is a cloud in front of the sun. Anybody can use a strobe, anybody can use any light—but to capture the sentiment of the light—that is not so easy.

PDN: Has your approach to lighting changed much over the course of your career?

Roversi: Yes. In the beginning, my lighting was very stiff, very different from today. I was taking a lot of care with the light. Maybe the relationship between the light and me was young, so I was a little bit scared of the light. But now the relationship is much cooler—we know each other much better and everything is much easier. In the beginning, like many young photographers, I think I wanted to show what I was able to do with the light. I was more narcissistic about it.

Now I am much more humble. I prefer to hide

10-foot-wide x 13-foot-long dark gray wool

AUDREY, FROM LIBRETTO Here the photographer used a Mag-Lite® flashlight—a signature Roversi lighting technique that has been widely imitated— to illuminate this ethereal image. It was published in 2000 in Libretto (translated literally from the Italian, the title means “little book”), a small volume based on the photographer’s Comme des Garçons fashion images.

Roversi worked in total darkness to create the image, using a single, hand-held Mag-Lite flashlight with a Lee #201 Full CTB gel to light the model. Exposure times ranged from one to four seconds, depending on the part of the model being illuminated. He recorded the image on Polaroid 669 film with an Alpa 12 WA camera and a Schneider 120mm lens set at f/5.6.

Mag-Lite Torch moved by hand in total darkness, with Lee #201 Full CTB gel.

Exposure times between 1 and 4 seconds

Model, 10 feet away from backdrop

ALPA 12 WA camera with Polaroid back and Schneider 120mm lens set at f/5.6

what my light is doing. Now I work more in a way that the subject is dictating the light.

PDN: How does this affect the lighting decisions that you make on a daily basis?

Roversi: I try to be very fresh, very spontaneous and very free when I work. Sometimes, when I arrive at the studio in the morning, the lights are just sitting in a certain way—however my assistant left them— and I will just switch on these lights and take a picture without changing anything. Chance is very important to me.

PDN: How do you go about lighting an image?

Roversi: When I work in my studio, I always start with the main light. The main light for me is the sun, even if it is a tungsten source or an HMI. I always start with my sun. I set up one light—with its one angle, one shadow, one direction, one intensity, one quality.

Then, around this sun, I can start to maybe put reflections, to put other little lights here and there and there.

PDN: What is it like to light with the Mag-Lite?

Roversi: When I work with a flashlight, I work in total darkness. I have to think about how long I will keep the light on different parts of the subject. And I have to think about the direction that I am moving

the light in, because the quality of the light is determined by how I move the flashlight with my hand.

It is like using a pencil in a way. A writer, or a painter or a composer of music is filling a white canvas. But, for me, photography is a black canvas. And on this black page, I use the Mag-Lite to write with the light.

PDN: People will sometimes refer to lighting done with Mag-Lite flashlights as “Roversi lighting.” How did you arrive at this technique?

Roversi: Everything in photography is very old. Perhaps this [technique] had not yet been adapted for fashion photography because the model cannot move too much because of the very long exposure.

It is not so simple, but it is easy for me because I work with Polaroid film. I can see the result immediately.

The most difficult thing is establishing the exposure time—how long you keep the light on the subject.

Sometimes it is difficult to judge, and with the MagLite it is a matter of a second. So you have to move the flashlight very quickly. But I like this light because it is completely irregular. You never know what will happen.

PDN: Given the spontaneity you bring to your lighting, do you ever find yourself lacking a necessary piece of lighting equipment?

Roversi: I have enough lighting equipment to do

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Lighting Master vinegar on my salad. You never want to eat the same dish every night!

But my old 8 x 10 camera, my Deardorff, of course that is my favorite. When I work with that, I feel at home.

PDN: Do you have a preference for hard or soft sources?

Roversi: I prefer soft, indirect light-diffused light.

PDN: Where did you learn about lighting?

Roversi: I don’t know if I've learned about lighting yet. I’m still learning, still discovering. That’s why I like photography.

I never went to school for photography. I learned lighting by working as an assistant. I learned by looking at the photographs of the masters of photography and the paintings of the great masters. You never invent: you simply take your influences from the giants before you.

KIRSTEN, FROM NUDI At first glance, this creamy, sensuous nude looks more like a page out of an artist’s sketchbook than a contemporary photograph of a well-known fashion model. Who else but Roversi could place an unadorned fashion model on a plain white background—with soft, shadowless illumination—and create an image this striking? This was published in his book, Nudi, a 1999 collection of quadratone images.

Roversi overexposed the image slightly to wash out the skin tones and impart a ghostly, transparent quality to his subject. He illuminated the set with two Arri 2500watt HMI fresnels, placed at the front of the set on camera right and camera left and bounced into a 10foot-wide x 6.5-foot-high white paper reflecting panel placed behind the camera.

“This is my way to obtain a very diffused light,” he notes.

To create the dark lines that define the shape of the model’s body and separate her skin tones from the background, he placed a 20-foot-wide x 6.5-foot-high black foamcore panel on each side of the model. These subtractive panels, combined with the bounced illumination, create a subtle interplay of light and shadow that gives the image its “artist’s sketch” quality.

He exposed the image for 1/60th of a second on Kodak Tri-X film with a Rolleiflex Twin-Lens camera and an 80mm F 2.8 Planar lens set at f/5.6

PDN: Your latest book, Studio—which will feature more than 100 photographs from 25 years of photography—is scheduled for publication in September 2005. In interviews about the book, you've been quoted as saying that the studio is not just a space or a place, but a theater of the imagination—your observatory, the lens through which you watch the universe. What can you tell us about this book?

10-foot-wide x 13foot-long white seamless backdrop 20-foot-wide x 6.5-foot-high black foamcore panel

Model

Arri 2,500-watt HMI fresnel

20-foot-wide x 6.5-foot-high black foamcore panel

Arri 2,500-watt HMI fresnel Rolleiflex Twin-Lens camera with 60mm Planar lens set at f/5.6

10-foot-wide x 6.5-foot-high white paper reflecting panel

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many different things. I can always use another light.

My lighting is not dependent on a particular source.

There are many different possible ways to light a subject, and I choose one—the one that is coming from my heart, that is all.

PDN: Are you still working primarily with Polaroid film?

Roversi: Most of the time, yes.

PDN: Are you shooting with large-format cameras exclusively?

Roversi: Much of the time I still work with 8 x 10 cameras. This is the reason that I work with one-second, two-second, three-second and sometimes

20-second or 30-second exposures. I never mind how long the exposure is—it is very rare that I shoot at exposures that are shorter than a quarter second.

But I am very free about the things that I use. I have no prejudice. I can use other cameras as well. It depends on what I want to do. Sometimes I change cameras three times before I find the right one. I’ll start with an 8 x 10 camera and two hours later I am shooting with my Leica or the Linhof.

I also work with the Rolleiflex for the 6 x 6 cm and the Alpa for the 6 x 9 cm. I like the little Polaroid SX70s too and the Holga plastic cameras.

It's very subjective—and sometimes very arbitrary.

I change cameras for the same reason that I put more

Roversi: The subject of this book is very personal. It is an ensemble of pictures of my studio, of the place where I work—of the chair that I work in, my camera, my lens, all of my instruments, my window where the lighting is coming from. Many of the images are still life shots within the studio or shots of the studio itself, and these are interspersed with sequences of nudes and portraits of models.

PDN: Has anything influenced your lighting recently?

Roversi: When I came back from my last trip to India, I could not stop thinking about India in the moonlight. In my mind, I kept seeing all of these little candles in the temples—and dust everywhere. I was very attracted by this dust, because you see more of the light with the dust. India, for me, was one big shadow. Sometimes I didn’t know what I was seeing in those shadows: a man, a god, a cow, a stone—and the mysteries that these shadows contained fascinated me.

So when I came back to my studio, I wanted to work with no light at all. I began a search for no light—it was as if I were searching for something deeper, because the light sometimes reveals too much.

PDN: Is there a particular quality that you’ve been consistently striving for in your lighting for different

assignments over the years?

Roversi: When I look at my pictures from 20 years ago, even when the technique of the light is very different, I see a kind of unity, and this is surprising me a lot. Even in my book, Nudi, the photos look like they were taken in the same place, in the same light, on the same day. But they were taken over the course of 10 to 12 years, in New York, London, Paris. Sometimes they were done with window light, sometimes with HMI, but of course the design of the light was always the same. I think that in every image there’s a skeleton of the light, and the skeleton of my pictures is a little bit the same.

But I don’t think a certain light should become one’s style. I know some photographers who screw a light into the floor of their studio because they like it, and this becomes their style. I think this is terrible. It is too much like putting the same jacket on every day because you want to be recognized and you are afraid that if you change jackets you won’t be recognized anymore.

Your personality is not coming from your jacket or the cut of your hair—and your photographic style should not be coming from a lighting technique.

Your photographic style comes from your creative expression, from your esthetic, from the beauty that you can bring to the image, the emotion that you can give to the people who are looking at your work. ■