the scannography blog

Jens Standke came to our site last year, working with lights and movements.

He gave me some news. This is not "scannography" as we define it anymore but it stays in connection with scanners so I thought I give you the info as I find he today's work really interesting.

Jens worked with a scanner to capture his own movemet that he then transformed in sculpture : "The experience is: By moving our body we are taking more space and another time as normally ascribed.". So movement and scanner stay in his body of work and it's good to see a concrete result of this thinking and working.

If you want to see more photos click here : "Photos"

You can also check the video of his "making-of" here: "Video"

Diane Kaye made me discover this nice, well rythmed and funny clip. Melting all kind of scannographic images. You can watch it here Created by Damon Stea of Mindfruit Studios made Memoirs of a Scanner with Cassandra Chowdhury and Zack DeZon.“The shoot probably took around six hours of pure, unadulterated face-to-the-scanner animating, followed by pickup shots of all the papers and transitions,” Stea said. “Editing was pretty quick as well — it was a remarkably simple process to actually complete.”

I hope they will produce others…

Yes I know, flowers, flowers, when it comes to scannography it always comes to flowers.

But Roberta Bailey (she has her own website here), brings the subject to a new level. At least to my eyes. She plays with colors, transparencies, and lights without crashing the simplicity of the elements she presents. Her creations are just perfect. The essence of her body of work seems to be beauty, something that gets more and more lost in Contemporary Art. That's maybe why we are not looked at as artists, but as some bunch of amateurs playing with scanners !!!
Go and see these images (on scannography.org) , I think you'll be amazed too (especially if you like flowers as much as Modern Art, which I personnaly do, being open minded is important these times).
I hope she will touch a large public and so help scannography get it's way forward.

Jaime Ruas is a spanish graphic designer and painter.
We added a page in the technic part of our site where Jaime explains his very special technic of painting.

Jaime has build a special box in which he can mix, paint, add liquids while scanning. He explains : "This box allows many different techniques to paint in it, without damaging the normal operation of the scanner. The different techniques used in this box are over thirty. Amongst them, you can make collages with damp paper, pencils, watercolors, acrylic paints, wax, adhesive tapes, inks, fabrics, wood, metal, and can paint with brushes, sponges, or even with bare hands, the possibilities of artistic creation is endless."

I hope that his revealing of a special method will give others the idea to try and find new directions to develop this artform. Thank you Jaime…

Patri presents a new site full of new scanns, technics and informations.
Patri's site remains one of the most important sites for what concerns scannography. She still has links to DigitalArt gallery, where she gives classes.

Here are some of Patri's new scanns :

I hope you will all take a look and give her your impressions.

Thanks to Scot Alexander, the scannography page on Wikipedia looks great now !

Finally we arrive on a consistent page. This is an encyclopedical article, well structured, with references, and keeping a minimum external links. Scot Alexander rewrote the whole article based on Patri's first researches and thanks to her help in searching bibliographical sources. Scot Alexander added a lot of elements and enriched the whole.



The only thing missing now, in my opinion, are some good examples of images.
To add such images, they have to be added in Wikipedia's Creative Commons. That means that you allow anybody to use this image you uploaded there, without having to pay any rights to you. You remain the author but allow the image to be reused in any possible manner. So if some amongst you are ready to do so, I think that would help improve the article. Scot added one of my images I gave out there. I'm now working on a french translation of Scot's article…

I wanted to start this from the beginning. It is now time !! I wish to compare what kind of scanner we use to do our scanns. Here under you will find a list of questions I would like you to answer.

An example of the differences between scanners. I scanned this insect (lucanus cervus) with 2 different scanners and you can see the result is very different :

This one is with the Quato X-finity and covered with white paper. Not much depth of field but a good color depth.


This one is with the Epson 1670. Greater depth of field ! But I reworked the colors and contrast on that one…

Here is the questionnary in 16 points :

Please copy the questions and answer them on a mail to me

1. How many scanners do you own ?

2, What trademark and what model is it ?

3. What is the maximum resolution of it per inch (dpi) without interpolation ?

4. Is it enough for your scannography works ?

5. Do you know how much depth of field it has ?

6. Do you know what color depth it has ?

7. Is it a 3-pass or 1-pass scanner ?

8. Is it CCD or CIS ?

9. Do you use it unconventially (like not letting it on a flat surface, taking it outdoor…) ?

10. Do you use external light to enhance your scanning ?

11. Are you protecting the glass when scanning objects ?

12. How do you clean the glass ?

13. Do you rework your scanns or do you use the image as it comes out once scanned ?

14. What software do you use to rework your images ?

15. What kind of computer to do you use ?

16. Is there anything specific you want to add about your material ?

…but is this still what we call scannography ?

Somewhere between medical imagery and artistic research, Rodolphe Gombergh proposed 2006 an exhibition called "transparent women" (festival @rt outsiders). Sophisticated technology allows him to show us the inside of human bodies without having to introduce camera in them. The radiologist uses medical scanners to obtain these images…



This is Art for sure, medical maybe but is it scannography ? What do you think ?

And to have an animated view of Rodolphe's Art go to this page. It can seem deranging, strange, weird but there is beauty here and also an other way to see ourselves !!!

Photo-Artists who want guidance on scanning flowers and other three-dimensional objects using a (preferably Epson Perfection/Expression) flatbed scanner normally used for digitizing film, photographs and documents can attend my classes at digitalartacademy.com

There are over 100 "scanographers" devoted to this emerging medium but there is only a handful of published books and articles about the subject. Many of the artists are conventional photographers, but many are pursuing fine art scanning exclusively. Although this is a medium that appears to be initially "easy" to accomplish, soon challenges arise and then one gets ambitious. Many of the artists have admitted to an "obsession" with scanning, in particular- flowers (myself included!). But then as soon as I saw my first murky scan I recognised the creative potential. I had no idea that other artists had independently "discovered" that a scanner is actually a very high rez digital camera. It was years before I realized that there was another artist, right in my own backyard (okay, 20 minutes down I-95 to be exact) doing exactly the same thing! Not only that, our artistic approach and our specimens were so similar that it gave the both of us chills! Because some guy keeps messing with the Wikipedia "Scanography" entry that I started several years ago, Christian and I have started this blog by and for photoartists who are actively pursuing this medium or interested in learning more about it.

About Scanner Photography:

The flatbed scanner was developed by Ray Kurzweil.

To the best of my knowledge the first artist(s) to use the procedure for scanning three-dimensional objects as a work of art appears to be Keith Smith/Sonia Sheridan. (MoMA exhibit April 1974.)

Technically, scanner photography has more in common with large-format camera photography than it has with Xerox copy images. Many scanographers had experimented with "Xerox" and color copier object collage images until the color photo scanner/computer became affordable in the 1990s (myself included). The method of arranging objects face-down on the platen "feels" exactly the same and the resulting image is a 1:1 capture...but the "negative" is equal to a reproducable digital image file.

If you want a copy of "The List" (of photoartists involved in this medium) send me an e-mail request.