Iphone 15 Billboard in Via XX Settembre

This is an attempt to exploit the limitations of an orthocromatic film. Shadows and highlights were deliberately pushed, as was the contrast.

This isn’t about the billboard. Not really.

Yes, there’s a giant child smiling over Rome, her face stretched across several metres of vinyl, captured “with an iPhone 15,” if we’re to believe the tagline. She’s luminous, playful, part of a campaign you’ve probably already seen before you’ve even looked at it.

But the photograph is something else. This was shot on orthocromatic film—intentionally. Shadows are carved in deeper than they should be. Highlights flare and collapse detail. The tonal scale isn’t flattering, and it isn’t faithful. It’s limited. And that was the point.

The building—rigid, mirrored, bureaucratic—reflects the billboard awkwardly, like it’s been caught watching. And below, the street scene is frozen in harsh tones: pharmacy sign ghosted by contrast, white vans etched like stencils, people rendered more as presence than detail.

This isn’t a celebration of technical perfection. It’s an experiment in refusal.

To take a hyper-modern corporate image and trap it inside an old emulsion that doesn’t know how to read it. To exaggerate the failure of the medium in the face of the message. To let silver react poorly to digital polish—and in doing so, say something analogue.

It’s not pretty. But it’s sharp in its own way.