The use of photography is recurring in the practice of Giorgio Andreotta Calò, who has explored its different uses elaborating, over the years, a personal aesthetic aimed to overcome those aspects that, according to the artist, constitute the main limits of this medium. In particular, Calò disbelieves that photography can play an effective role in documenting an experiential work, an immersive installation or an action in a realistic way. The actual experience, characterised by multi-sensory stimuli, a procedural development in time and space, and the different perception of each person, can never be replaced or fully recounted through a photographic image. For this reason, Calò resorts to techniques that privilege analogue mediums and, intervening directly either on the film or on the photosensitive material, realises images not so much for the purpose of an objective documentation, but rather a dreamlike transfiguration of a precise moment, an atmosphere, and a memory. The artist often turns to the use of Polaroid, as instant photography is able to grasp the immediacy of a relevant moment and imposes a rigid selection of the object to shoot. This body of works thus constitutes a set of visual notes and personal annotations which, all in all, also allows to reconstruct a biographical path of the artist. Starting from 2010, Calò creates a series of ‘cut polaroids’. After making the shot, he sections the print of the snapshot and reveals the two specular layers of which it is composed: the emulsified, almost monochromatic, internal matrix is thus exposed, and the image is deconstructed in a process that tends to abstraction. The subject of the photograph is not immediately recognisable, appearing mirrored in two images, one the negative of the other, and requires an active effort on the part of the spectator to be recomposed. This is a reference to the concept of ‘reflection’, which is consistently present throughout Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s work; besides, in this case, it designates both the symmetry of the composition of the work and the act of ‘reflecting’, understood as thinking.