Abstract Scanography Works

What does it mean to make photographs without a camera? This question drives my latest body of work, Abstract Scanography Works, where I explore the digital scanner as a photographic medium capable of creating purely abstract images. I place colored papers and textured materials directly onto the scanner bed, moving them as the light passes across the surface. The scanner's light beam becomes my camera, recording the movement of materials in real-time. There's no viewfinder, no decisive moment, just the direct interaction between light, material, and motion. Each scan captures something that never existed as a complete scene, building the image over a duration rather than an instant.

This approach connects to the Abstract Expressionists, who made the act of creation itself the content of the work. In my scanography, the process of scanning becomes the essence of the image. I draw inspiration from artists like Eileen Quinlan and Sven Pfrommer, who use scanners to create rich, complex compositions through the manipulation of various materials and colored substances.

These images emerge from what theorist Diarmuid Costello calls "constructed abstraction," photography that doesn't derive from a prior reality but is built from the ground up through photographic processes. The scanner becomes a drawing tool, light becomes paint, and time becomes the canvas on which these compositions unfold.