Paolo Roversi: My Guinevere

The striking allure of model Guinevere Van Seenus are captured in these haunting portraits from lauded Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi. The face of Miu Miu's recent 2012 resort campaign, Van Seenus's voluptuous natural beauty and silver screen visage have made the 34-year-old one of the most celebrated editorial muses of the past 15 years and a constant source of inspiration for Roversi. The images of the Dutch-American model are included in the photographer's upcoming solo exhibition at London’s Wapping Project Bankside, alongside incidental and observational shots of his Paris studio base. Typically shooting Polaroid 8x10, Roversi's dusky compositions play with texture, depth and shadow to create nostalgia-tinged scenes recalling the earliest bitumen photographs of the late 19th century. "To some extent it is about the passage of time," says Jules Wright, Director of The Wapping Project, about the importance of Roversi's work. "Images which burn in the memory and move beyond their original editorial intent—it is also about the distinctive voice of the photographer; his editorial work has been bent to fit his personal voice and not the other way round." A regular contributor to British Vogue, Vogue Italia and W, Roversi, whose first assignment was shooting the funeral of Ezra Pound in Venice, has collaborated with fashion influentials like Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Christian Dior over a career spanning four decades. “To succeed, you must combine the light of the past with the light of the future,” Roversi says. “Photography is not just a recreation of reality, it's a revelation.”