Picture Post #69: The Wallpaper

by Martin Cohen

Robert Polidori, Hotel Petra, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010

If there was something ‘a little spooky’ about last month’s Picture Post, on the face of it there should be too with this abandoned hotel room in a, to some extent, abandoned city, Beirut. 

And yet, that’s not my own reaction to it. On the contrary, the emptiness of the room creates the palette, and the symmetry of the disappearing doorways provides all the action the scene needs.

The colours too, seem to have been chosen by a master artist, as well, in this case they evidently were by the photographer, Robert Polidori. Unlike many of our other photographers, Polidori is well-known for his images of urban environments and interiors with his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Berlin), and Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) to mention just a few. 

Polidori has photographed the restoration of the Château de Versailles since the early 1980s and recorded the architecture and interiors of Havana, and this portrait of the Hotel Petra, once one of the most popular hotels in Beirut,  located in the city centre adjacent to the Grand Theatre seems to me to show that, for an artist, all buildings are equally valid as canvases.