Blind Exposures

What does it mean to capture a photograph without a camera? This series explores the digital flatbed scanner as an alternative photography tool capable of generating purely abstract images.

Colored papers and textured materials rest directly on the scanner glass and are shifted by hand as the sensor travels across the bed. The resulting blurs, physical drags, and density shifts occur entirely within the duration of the scan and remain completely untouched by later digital manipulation. Operating purely as studies of abstract form and materiality, the final pieces serve as a direct record of human gesture intersecting with mechanical motion.

This process reflects what theorist Diarmuid Costello describes as "constructed abstraction." Rather than capturing a prior reality, the photographs are built from their foundation through mechanical processes. The scanner functions as a drawing tool, light becomes paint, and time serves as the canvas on which these compositions unfold. Rather than functioning as traditional documents, these constructed spaces offer an alternative practice within contemporary visual culture. In an environment saturated with artificial and disembodied visions, the series occupies a unique space between photography, painting, and machine vision. It demonstrates that an image can still be a deeply physical and tactile event.