This book for the first time assembles images from Polidori's major photographic series Beirut, Versailles, Havanna, New Orleans and Pripyat and Chernobyl, giving an overall impression of his oeuvre. Each of the series constitutes an experimental entity whose goal is to reveal something that no longer exists. They reflect a particular world of memory, the relation between present and past, and delve deep into subjects of profound historical significance. Juxtaposing human suffering, destruction and the magnificence born of man's imagination, these many-layered images provoke highly emotional reactions. In his soundings of reality, the artist creates a theatre of absence, of commemoration.