'it's such an ancient pitch, but one I wouldn't switch, 'cause there's no nicer witch than you'

Paolo Roversi, more than any other fashion photographer, leads me to ask how literally a complete body of work can be considered a reliable self-portrait of the artist that produced it. The consistency of his style and the recognisability of his photographs helps me arrive at the question but never the answer, and perhaps that's part of the ongoing appeal for me. That and the fact that no other fashion photographer has produced images of such unapologetic romanticism and gone on to be a power house in the profession. Successful fashion photography so often has an overbearing and unavoidable link to raw eroticism and whether the women in the images are empowered with sadistic, domineering traits or seduce through submission and weakness, the sexuality is raw, surfaced, skinned and can alienate its viewers as it simultaneously tempts and intrigues them. Seeing Roversi's work in a fashion magazine is like seeing a wanted ad for true love in amongst requests for casual sex.Roversi's women are endowed with magical powers. Their sexual prowess boils beneath a mystical, paranormal surface. Eyes are blank but possess abyssal depth at the same time. Facial expressions betray locked boxes of sinister secrets and obsessions. The worlds he creates within the studios (he very rarely shoots on location) are integral to the illusion of reticence and ethereal atmosphere, transporting the viewer into an evil queen's castle, a witch's lair or an aristocrat's forbidding stately home by suggestion rather than through literal means. We feel we've walked into the subject's domain. Upon seeing one of his fashion portraits one can feel they've come across a young faun in the middle of a wood. There's a moment of recognition between you and the figure, but the connection is beyond your ability which only serves to make the experience more intense.Roversi works largely with overlapped exposures, long exposures and Polaroids. He has described his approach as 'anti-technical' and doesn't often use light meters. His methods fuel his images with fragility, emotional tremors and a sense of the temporary, as though you could run your hands through the smoke of the pictures and they'd warp or disappear. This sense of limited time lends an urgency to the way the viewer consumes and interprets. It leads to a sense of transportation and of seeing a vision and appreciating it only for what it can be at any one moment. Where fashion images often pierce us with fierce, dramatic scenes in sharp, crystal cut resolution, Roversi offers us a dream world where edges blur and rooms and figures materialise slowly from thin air. Where most demand our undivided attention, Roversi's subjects appear to shy away from it.

As an artist he has claimed his aim is to capture, 'a lot of the soul, a little of the personality.' Perhaps this is the easiest way to understand why he consistently portrays women as both angel and demon. His mesmerising chimeras often hold expressions of indifference or startled irritation as they regard us from the high grade magazine paper. We are merely spectators attempting to learn something about them. And we can see both vulnerability and malevolence, both alienesque otherness and raw femininity. Each subject belongs to our expectations of female individuality but also solely to herself and her unique nature. Most modern women strive for this duality and it's easy to detect and appreciate in his subjects despite the fairytale worlds they inhabit.