Beirut, Tripoli, Havana, Chernobyl, New Orleans, Rio, Amman, Versailles: over thirty years Robert Polidori has travelled the world photographing places whose names are so familiar that we feel we know them already. On the occasion of his first museum retrospective in the United States the artist selected more than a hundred pictures for this volume, which challenge our preconceptions and mine both the accoutrement and the psychology of space for what they tell us, and for what they withhold, about history, memory, identity and time.