Avoiding photo assemblage (too close to collage) and disdainful of multiple exposures and ‘Photoshopping’ (not pure enough), I have set out to make still-life and figurative images realized wholly in-camera with no external trickery. Because scanner photography is a new form of photography, I wish to start at the beginning, so to speak, and employ devices that were used in early photography, for example mise en scène.

About the Camera

These photographs were created with a scanner camera.
A scanner camera consists of an ordinary still camera attached to a flatbed scanner; the image is stored onto a computer. The scanner takes the place of the film. To build my first scanner camera, I used a 1930's Kodak 620 attached to a heavily modified flatbed scanner. My latest camera uses a 1940's Speed Graphic Combat Edition 4 x 5 field camera, joined to a flatbed scanner (see illustration below).

To realize photographs of familiar figurative themes, I have used the unfamiliar tool of a heavily hacked and altered flatbed scanner married to a vintage Nineteen Forties, 4x5 field camera. This Franken Camera provides an opportunity to create images which transcend the time dimension. Consider a regular photograph as being a hyperplane of four dimensional space, but the resulting three dimension are captured at a single point in time.
The scanner photograph offers an image, which, in addition to being inherently three dimensional, reveals the fourth dimension in a unique way. Each ‘exposure’ or ‘take’ occurs over a number of minutes– up to thirty minutes, or as little as one minute. The opposite ends of the image are captured at entirely different moments in time, not all at once as in a ‘regular’ photograph, thus the Temporal Hyperplane.

It is important to stress that these images were captured just as they now appear and have not been ‘photoshopped’ other than to adjust the levels of tonal value. Artifacts such as stripes and lines may seem like errors in the print but are in fact characteristics of an image made with a very heavily modified scanner.

Beau Daignault