There is something slightly strange about having one of the world's most important photography foundations sitting in A Coruña. Perhaps because the city is not normally the first place that comes to mind when we think about fashion photography, or perhaps because the scale of what the MOP Foundation has created here still feels relatively new. Either way, walking into the MOP is a reminder that interesting things do not always have to happen in the places we expect them to.
The Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation was established in 2022 with three ideas at its centre: A Coruña, photography and fashion. Since then, it has brought some of the most important names in the history of photography to the city, from Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel to Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, David Bailey and Annie Leibovitz. The exhibitions are free, and the Foundation has also developed educational initiatives and Future Stories, a program supporting young creatives at the beginning of their careers.
It is an impressive program by any standard. It becomes even more impressive when you consider where it takes place.
The MOP Centre occupies a former industrial space on A Coruña's Muelle de Batería, restored and reimagined by local architect Elsa Urquijo. What was once part of the working infrastructure of the port has become a place dedicated to looking, thinking and spending time with photography. The building itself is worth paying attention to. There is something particularly satisfying about seeing an old industrial structure retain its character while being given an entirely new purpose.
This summer, that space belongs to Paolo Roversi.
For anyone interested in photography, Roversi hardly needs an introduction, although his work deserves considerably more attention than a list of fashion clients would suggest. Born in Ravenna and based in Paris since the 1970s, Roversi has spent more than four decades developing a photographic language that is immediately recognizable: soft, atmospheric, intimate and often suspended somewhere between photography and painting.
His relationship with fashion has been extraordinary. He has worked extensively with Dior, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Cerruti, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Armani and Chanel, among others, while his photographs have appeared in publications including Vogue Italia, Vogue America, W, Vanity Fair and i-D. His collaborators have included some of the most important designers and models of the last four decades, from Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto to Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, Natalia Vodianova and Saskia de Brauw. But looking at Doubts simply as an exhibition of fashion photography would be missing the point.
Roversi has always been much more interested in what happens between the photograph and the person in front of his camera. His images often feel as though they have been allowed to exist rather than forced into existence. There is movement, blur, imperfection and a particular softness to the light that makes even the most recognizable faces feel strangely private.
His techniques are equally important. Roversi became fascinated with large-format Polaroid in the early 1980s and has continued to explore its possibilities throughout his career. He has also deliberately embraced accidents and imperfections, including an accidental processing experiment in 1990 that produced a colour negative from black-and-white Polaroid material and opened another avenue of experimentation. His work has incorporated slow exposures, movement, blurred focus, unusual lighting and, at various points, even the use of a simple flashlight to illuminate his subjects.
There is a lovely contradiction in all of this. Roversi has spent his career working within an industry obsessed with perfection, yet so much of his best work seems to come from allowing things to remain unresolved... Which brings us to the title: Doubts.
For Roversi, doubt isn't something to overcome. It is where the interesting part begins. He describes doubt as an open door to creativity and imagination, whereas certainty closes it. The exhibition takes that idea and turns it into the organizing principle of the entire experience.
Rather than presenting his career chronologically, Doubts moves through nine interconnected spaces: Theatre, Appearances, Shadows, Doubts, People, Presence, Grace, Beauty and Fading. Each room approaches his work from a different angle, creating something closer to a journey through his way of seeing than a traditional retrospective. The exhibition brings together around 196 works, including some of his most recognizable photographs alongside images that have never previously been shown.
Perhaps the most memorable thing about Doubts is how dramatically the exhibition controls it. You move through rooms that can feel almost completely dark, with the surrounding space deliberately disappearing around you. Then, seemingly suspended in that darkness, a photograph is illuminated with extraordinary precision. Nothing competes with it. There is no visual noise around the image. You are given the photograph, and almost nothing else.
Roversi's photographs already depend heavily on the relationship between light and shadow, and the exhibition seems to understand that showing them requires something more than simply putting them on a white wall. The darkness becomes part of the work. It slows you down. It changes your eyes. It makes you look at the photograph differently.
That is also why the MOP space works so beautifully for this exhibition. The former industrial warehouse has been transformed without losing the feeling that it once belonged to something else. Concrete, timber, darkness, open space and carefully controlled light sit alongside photographs that were created in studios, backstage rooms, fashion houses and private moments around the world. The contrast between the history of the building and the delicacy of Roversi's work is what makes the experience feel so specific to A Coruña.
It would be easy to see an exhibition like this as something that belongs in Paris, Milan, London or New York... Instead, it is here. And that might be the part we should appreciate most.
We spend a lot of time talking about how lucky we are to live in Spain and to have access to so much incredible art. Doubts is another example of that privilege, but perhaps an even more local one. You don't need to fly anywhere, buy an expensive ticket or plan a weekend around it. You can simply walk down to the port in A Coruña and spend an afternoon with the work of one of the great photographers of the last half-century.
Paolo Roversi's Doubts is at the MOP Foundation until September 20. Admission is free.
