Robert Polidori has been making books at Steidl for over 18 years now, and for many of his visits he lodged in an apartment adjacent to the publishing house. To the left of this, at Düstere Straße 6, stands a small humble house, not only the oldest dwelling in Göttingen but, dating back to 1310, one of the oldest half-timber houses in all of Germany. Miraculously never demolished over the centuries (just altered, repaired and patched up), it has now been restored by Gerhard Steidl and today houses the Günter Grass Archive, part of the University of Göttingen. Topographical Histories presents Polidori's 2016 photos of the interior walls of the building, whose glorious crumbling layers-fourteenth-century structures of wattle and daub, clay bricks and plaster, and remnants of paint and wallpaper from different centuries-bear witness to living history. Polidori focuses on the subtle colorations and depth and complexity of these surfaces, creating an unconventional, painterly architectural portrait.

Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and today lives in Ojai, California. Polidori's work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, and he received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006 his series of photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Polidori's bestselling books Havana (2003), Zones of Exclusion - Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003), After the Flood (2006), Parcours Muséologique Revisité (2009), Some Points in Between. Up Till Now (2010), Eye and I (2014) and Chronophagia (2014) have been published by Steidl.