From then on, Lo Schiavo has been seamlessly alternating between real-world and digital photography, although the physical works he made for galleries, remained essential until the NFT boom. A turning point was the Wind Sculptures series, in which he used space blankets to create ephemeral sculptures by playing with camera exposure times.
“All my photos are staged,” says the artist, emphasising that photography “is not the reality”, although we are inclined to believe so, especially when it comes to analogue photography. “But film is still a medium, it doesn’t capture reality as it is. Perhaps a photo imprinted on the sensor of my iPhone is more real,” he comments, recounting an experiment he did recently.
“I transformed some digital images into medium format film shots, sending them to a specialised lab” – probably the only one on the planet that do it in colour, in New Mexico. From the film, the photo was then printed. “People think that digital reality goes against physical reality, but they are two simply different things,” comments Lo Schiavo. “Virtual reality does not discredit physical reality”. Of course, at that point, we could only start talking about the Metaverse.
