Photographer Vitor Schietti’s pictures really feel much less like frozen instants and extra like reminiscences caught mid-drift. Hovering between remark and creativeness, his pictures stretch time, bend mild, and invite viewers into moments that really feel each acquainted and otherworldly.
Earlier than images, Schietti’s inventive basis was constructed via drawing and portray, notably watercolor, throughout his teenage years. That early urge to specific visually by no means left him, at the same time as his instruments developed.
“I all the time had an urge to specific via artwork. I transitioned to images, having began from drawing and portray in my teenage years, particularly watercolor,” Schietti says.
He started photographing on movie within the early 2000s, nevertheless it was the shift to digital that actually accelerated his progress. The immediacy of digital images provided a quicker, extra versatile method to translate concepts into pictures, permitting his ardour for the medium to take maintain. A defining second got here in 2006, whereas dwelling in Montreal, when road images, lengthy exposures, and light-weight portray helped him absolutely embrace his identification as a photographer.
Dream Logic and the Language of Mild
Schietti’s work is pushed by creativeness moderately than documentation. His pictures typically really feel dreamlike, formed by reminiscence, movement, and delicate emotional cues moderately than literal narratives. This strategy is intentional, rooted in his perception that reminiscence and creativeness are central to how folks join with the world.
“I’m completely satisfied once I create pictures that play with the creativeness, that appear to return from a dream, or that evoke reminiscences,” Schietti says.
To realize this, he incessantly depends on lengthy publicity, mild portray, and a number of exposures, strategies that enable him to maneuver past easy illustration. His inventive influences prolong properly past images, drawing inspiration from filmmakers resembling Akira Kurosawa, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Richard Linklater, in addition to photographers like Gjon Mili, Gregory Crewdson, and Reuben Wu, and up to date artists together with Anish Kapoor and Eric Staller. Collectively, these influences contribute to a visible language that feels cinematic, surreal, and emotionally layered.
For Schietti, essentially the most rewarding moments come when a picture carries each aesthetic influence and emotional depth. He sees images as a method to contribute one thing constructive, creating pictures that invite reflection and connection.
“The sensation of making one thing lovely, with layers of meanings, with colours and shapes that seize the attention and invite it to a journey… once I seize a picture that transmits these emotions, I really feel I’m contributing to make this world a bit higher,” Schietti explains.
A few of his most significant pictures are deeply private, tied to relationships, journey, or challenges he’s experiencing on the time. Translating these lived experiences into visible kind provides one other layer of significance, each for him and for the viewer.
Movement Versus Planning: Two Methods of Working
Schietti’s workflow strikes between spontaneity and cautious preparation. In his extra intuitive strategy, he explores cities and landscapes in a state of movement, strolling slowly and remaining attentive to mild, gesture, coloration, and probability interactions. Many pictures could also be merely good, however persistence typically results in one thing sudden and compelling.
This mindset is central to his ongoing Prolonged Moments collection, which has grown to embody nineteen cities, with Hong Kong as the latest addition.
In distinction, initiatives like Impermanent Sculptures demand a extremely deliberate course of. These pictures, created by drawing with sparks of sunshine throughout lengthy exposures, require scouting, particular permissions, and detailed tools preparation. Put up-production then turns into a second of discovery, when the picture reveals its remaining kind.
“The joys right here arrives in the course of the modifying, once I unveil a picture that invitations the viewer to marvel about what’s actual and what’s imagined,” Schietti says.
Recurring Themes: Nature, Streets, and Surreal Gestures
A deep respect for the pure world runs via a lot of Schietti’s work. Whereas not a wildlife photographer by definition, he’s drawn to animals at any time when the chance arises, notably in sanctuaries or protected environments.
Road images is one other fixed thread. The combo of luck, consideration, and readiness required to seize fleeting moments continues to problem and energize him. Based mostly in Barcelona, he teaches road images via the Pentaprisma college, typically photographing alongside his college students. Observing human conduct in city areas, even via oblique or architectural traces, has turn out to be each a method to perceive humanity and a type of inventive remedy.
“To see an individual via completely different shapes of eyes is magical,” Schietti says.
Mild portray stays a very necessary outlet, reconnecting him together with his roots in portray. Whether or not utilizing fireplace, water, or digicam motion, Schietti treats mild as a brush, pushing images towards abstraction and painterly expression.
Whereas instinct performs a serious position in Schietti’s decision-making, technical consciousness stays important. Publicity, depth of area, focus, and composition are all the time thought-about in service of the picture’s intention. Years of experimentation, together with failure, have helped him refine how technical selections can help emotional influence.
“There’s actually plenty of instinct that arrives from years and years of follow,” Schietti says. “However technical features… are necessary to remember and be attentive always.”
Defining Photographs and Private Milestones
Among the many many pictures he has created, just a few maintain particular significance. A current picture of a tree in China’s Huangshan province, captured utilizing lengthy publicity and digicam motion, echoed an analogous {photograph} he made in Greece years earlier, creating a private dialogue throughout time and place.
One other key work, Submerged (Brazil, 2012), was created with the digicam partially underwater whereas a detailed buddy dove close by. The {photograph} carries the emotional weight of that shared expertise and is presently exhibited on the Nordic Modern Heart in Xiamen, China. Tree of Life (Brazil, 2015), one of many earliest pictures from Impermanent Sculptures, has turn out to be essentially the most emblematic {photograph} of that collection and marked a pivotal second in his creative route.
Trying Forward: Pictures and Cinema
Schietti’s ambitions prolong past nonetheless images. His long-term aim is to maintain himself solely via his creative work whereas persevering with to develop into cinema as a director of images.
“My greatest aspiration is to stay solely via my creative images and route of images in cinema. I’ve spent a few years working in promoting images in Brazil earlier than emigrating to Barcelona, Spain, the place I’ve continued to work in images with new purchasers and do extra video than picture,” Schietti says.
At the moment finding out Course of Pictures on the Barcelona College of Cinema and Animation, he continues to stability commissioned work with private initiatives. A current creative residency in China strengthened his want to journey and create, and new developments inside Impermanent Sculptures are already in movement, with extra to be revealed in 2026.
Throughout all codecs and strategies, Vitor Schietti’s work stays anchored in connection. By means of prolonged moments, painted mild, and thoroughly noticed fragments of the world, he invitations viewers to decelerate, think about extra deeply, and reconnect with the wonder and complexity that encompass them.
Picture credit: Vitor Schietti
