Pace Gallery, New York, Sept 11 to 25 October, 2025
Paolo Roversi show in Pace’s focused retrospective, titled Along the Way, staged to coincide with New York Fashion Week and running mid-September through late October.
What surprised me, walking into it, was how little the show tried to “convert” the skeptical viewer. A lot of fashion photography in a white-cube gallery arrives with an apologetic posture: please notice the craft, please forget the client, please treat these as pictures not product. Pace mostly sidestepped that anxiety by leaning into Roversi’s real subject, which is not “fashion” so much as the conditions under which someone becomes image. The wall texts and selection emphasized collaborators and long relationships, which is the right frame for him. His best work is basically an extended study in trust, timing, and light.
The installation helped. Pace’s Chelsea spaces can take photography without making it feel like an afterthought, and here the hang was clean and fairly unforced, letting the prints breathe. You could register Roversi’s signature atmosphere quickly: faces emerging from a soft darkness, edges dissolving, the sense that the photograph was developed out of a memory rather than made from a setup. (That is the sales pitch, of course. But in Roversi’s case, it is perhaps broadly true.)
The show’s strongest argument might be simply accumulation. Thirty-plus images spanning roughly the 1990s to the present can reveal a lot, even if the selection stays within the lane of portrait and fashion collaboration. You see how he repeats a few moves, then repeats them again until they stop being “style” and start reading as conviction. The key one is his handling of the face: not as a crisp endpoint, but as a surface you approach slowly. His portraits of models and sitters do not feel like the decisive-moment tradition; they feel like someone trying to hold still long enough for the camera to catch up.
Now for the skeptical bit. The show also made clear what Roversi does not do. He is not interested in the documentary edge or the social texture that makes other fashion photographers bite. If you are looking for friction, context, or the world leaking into the frame, you are out of luck. Roversi’s images are hermetic: studio-born, inward, intentionally timeless. That can read as depth, or as a kind of aesthetic embargo, depending on your tolerance for romanticism. In a moment when so much portraiture leans on speed, irony, or confession, Roversi’s sincerity can feel almost aggressively “pure.” Whether that is moving or slightly claustrophobic is the viewer’s call.
What the show did especially well was position fashion not as commerce but as a constraint, and a productive one. You could see how designers, stylists, and subjects become part of a single apparatus that he tunes toward stillness. The best pictures in the show were “double portraits” in the sense Vogue describes: portrait of the person, portrait of the garment, with neither fully winning. It is a subtle way to defend fashion photography in a gallery context, because it does not pretend the clothes are incidental.
The real medium here is space and light control. Roversi is building a room where a face can appear. That is why the pictures feel devotional, and also why they can feel repetitive. His world is intentionally small, and he keeps returning to it.
