In late September 2005, Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans to record the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and by the city's broken levees. He found the streets deserted, and, without electricity, eerily dark. The next day he began to photograph, house by house: -All the places I went in, the doors were just open. They had been opened by what I collectively call Ithe army, ' of maybe 20 National Guards from New Hampshire, 15 policemen from Minneapolis, 20 firefighters from New York... On maybe half of them or a third of them that I went in, I think that the occupants had been there...

From his images of the Chateau of Versailles under restoration to the faded grandeur of Havana, to scenes of devastation from Chernobyl after the nuclear explosion and a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, Robert Polidori is drawn to detritus, shattered worlds and elegant ruin. Often considered an architectural photographer, Polidori captures more than buildings: his highly detailed views of interiors evoke both the intimate and the mysterious, wherein the humanity of these photos is felt in its very absence, in the traces left behind in vacant spaces once inhabited. Chronophagia...

In his new book, Robert Polidori presents us with a large-format photograph of a city block in an improvisational, auto-constructed settlement in Mumbai, India. In an almost seamless progression that appears to expand like an accordion or folding-screen, the photograph is composed of multiple images imperceptibly overlaid and welded together in a complex process to form a panoramic view. Applying remote sensing techniques that are normally used in space cartography to street photography, Polidori ventures a photographic attempt to come to terms with the phenomena of adjacencies, observing and...