Katinka Matson's Scanner Photography

By Xeni Jardin at 8:01 pm Saturday, Dec 14

Katinka Matson's incredibly cool photography--which she creates using scanners, not cameras--is covered in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine. Kevin Kelly writes the intro on her web site. Excerpt from the NYT Mag article follows:

This year, two different artists working independently, one on each coast, mounted exhibits that were remarkably similar: a collection of dazzling images of cut flowers, "photographed" not with a camera but with the moving lens of a flatbed scanner, the kind used in offices every day... Both artists create their images by placing flowers and other natural objects on top of a 12-by- 17-inch scanner - they leave the top raised to avoid crushing the flowers - and then scanning the arrangement from below. The method creates a digital image that is vivid and precise: a photograph that requires neither film nor camera.

Behind this new style of photography is the idea that the moving wand of a scanner can capture a sense of perspective, a richness of color and a level of detail that a single, static lens cannot. Back when scanners were used only to reproduce flat images like prints or documents or book pages, people assumed that images created on a scanner would lack depth. In fact, the opposite is true: the flowers look thick and voluptuous, and the images seem almost three-dimensional. Petals touching the screen appear crisp, while ones raised an inch or two are ghostly shadows, fading into blackness.

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