May 30 - August 1, 2015 (interruption from June 23 to July 4)
Polka Galerie

Claude Nori

L'aventure d'un photographe

Les amants de Rimini, 1983

« The Adventure of a Photographer » is the title of Italo Calvino’s latest short story. Its hero is a photographer who lives with a woman he loves so much that he is constantly and obsessively photographing her, having decided that “Photography only has meaning if it has exhausted all possible images”.


A french artist of Italian descent, Claude Nori adapted Calvino’s novel into a  lm in the 80’s, which certainly had a strong impact on his own photography. When he was a teenager growing up in Toulouse, his shyness would keep him from talking to girls. Discovering the camera and the concept of photographic  irting helped him capture brief encounters, faces and smiles of young women wanting to be looked at and approached for a moment lasting forever.

Drawing from reportage and fiction, Nori’s images are the fruit of an aesthetic that combines dilettantism and an innate sense of geometry. They weave the tale of beach-scented sea-side stories of a sweet but at times cruel summer, whose kisses and anthems leave their everlasting mark.

From colour to black and white, from book to book, Claude Nori pursues his photo-biographic quest, with references from Italian cinema, the sensual actresses of its hey day and the lovers of Verona, birth town of his parents which has haunted him since his childhood.

This creative nostalgia blossomed between Stromboli and the Rimini Lido, via Toulouse and Biarritz where Nori currently lives with Isabelle the constant muse of his new journeys.
Polka Gallery is delighted to announce the presentation of Claude Nori’s latest publication, a
photographer that held in the highest of regards in French photography’s recent history, both as an artist and as the founder of Contrejour Publications (launched in Paris in 1975).

The exhibit will take place between the 28th of May until August the 1rst, with a Summer holiday interruption from June 23rd till July 4th included.