From Frank Gehry to Milan’s skyscrapers: Paolo Rosselli and the art of photographing architecture against the rules

For Paolo Rosselli, photographing architecture does not mean describing it, but entering inside it. “Photography must arise from a desire to represent something. This something must coincide with one's own way of being,” he says to Domus while walking through the halls of the retrospective that Triennale Milano has dedicated to him, open until January 6, 2026. It is a way of photographing that he built over time: from the years when, very young, he frequented Ugo Mulas’s studio, to his travels around the world. Throughout his career, Rosselli has crossed continents and architectures — from India to Northern Europe, from Japan to construction sites in Milan — and his images have been published by many international magazines, with a highly personal representation of architecture and cities. For Domus he creates exclusive photographic features, such as the one on Mexico City for issue 899 under the direction of Stefano Boeri — on display at the Triennale — or the celebrated tribute to Terragni’s Casa del Fascio on the centenary of its construction.

The exhibition “Paolo Rosselli. Mondi in posa” highlights a truth that runs through all his work: architecture can be narrated without obedience to its “official image,” allowing the photographer’s eye — and the unforeseen reality surrounding buildings — to enter the scene as part of a personal story.

“When I arrive in a city, I always buy a mirror,” Paolo Rosselli tells Domus, while commenting on the photographs from the Specchi, Riflessi (Mirrors, Reflections) series. These are compositions designed to compress several elements into a single image — a practice initiated in the early 2000s in Helsinki, through which the photographer aimed to heighten the effect of visual disturbance. In the photo, the street, cars, and people belonging to the frontal scene appear, while at the same time what is behind also appears: the port, with a ship departing. This is far from the idea of isolated and neutral architectural photography.

But the act of introducing “foreign bodies” into photographs recurs in other images and series, such as Scena Mobile (Moving Scene), begun in 1981 in Calcutta from a taxi, and later continued in Mexico City, Beirut, and Los Angeles, up to Milan, where a manga doll almost always appears on the dashboard: “she had to give the idea of being a companion escorting the disoriented visitor in a new, sprawling, transforming city,” he says, referring to Milan’s Porta Nuova, which in 2012 was already a gigantic construction site. In the Bidimensionali (Two-dimensional) series — born as a game of compositions in his studio in Milan — the human body becomes the foreign presence. But “when a person is present, they generally tend to steal the scene from the rest,” Rosselli explains, which is why he decides to include only a pair of knees at the edges of the photographs in the compositions of objects.

Among the photos on display, in the Case series, are the interiors of Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea, but it is in Architecture Revisited that Rosselli reviews a century of architectural history: Arne Jacobsen’s gas station in Bellevue, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Steven Holl’s Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada Aoyama in Tokyo — just a few of the icons depicted in unexpected and revisited ways, to the point that Gehry’s masterpiece is photographed reflected in the window of a bar. “I knew there was a need for architectural photographs different from the usual ones,” he says, and for this reason he built his own way of observing space. He then notes a trend heading in the opposite direction: “today, looking at magazines, it seems to me that some photographers choose to conform completely to a model, and there is no difference between a photo taken in Brasília or in Switzerland.” In fact, in the exhibition itinerary curated by Rosselli himself, the most rigorous images of Le Corbusier’s buildings in Chandigarh and the deliberately “disturbed” ones — with objects and people or photographed from the window of a moving car — tell the same story: the city is always more complex than its best image.