About

Filippo Romano is a London-based graphic designer with over six years of experience working across branding and visual identity.

His recent work focuses on scanning surfaces found around London including walls, posters, tags and graffiti. Instead of taking photos, he uses a portable scanner to collect textures directly from the street, building abstract layered pieces from what he finds. Moving the scanner by hand creates distortion and imperfections that change how the surface is captured, giving a different result each time.

Working this way also documents how quickly street art changes. Posters get covered, graffiti disappears and walls are repainted, so scanning becomes a way of recording moments that might not exist the next day. The work acts as an archive of these everyday changes, turning overlooked parts of the city into new graphic compositions.

Artist Note

The tags, street markings used within this work are not my own. They are part of the public environment and are documented as found across London. If you recognise your work or tag within any piece and would like to be credited, please email me directly. I am happy to acknowledge original artists and direct any traffic or attention towards your work.

Notes

Field reports, observations, and essays from the studio and the street. On cities, surfaces, photography, and the work of paying attention.

What happens to a wall: the archaeology of street surfaces in post-regeneration London

A city regenerates. Scaffolding goes up. Hoardings appear. When they come down, everything is clean and new and identical. But before that moment — in the weeks and months when the old surface is still present, still legible — there is a brief window in which the entire history of a place is visible at once.

On photographing buildings that don’t know they’re beautiful

There is a category of architecture that does not expect to be looked at. Industrial units. Utility buildings. The backs of things. These structures were built to function, not to be admired — and that indifference to the gaze is precisely what makes them worth photographing.

Scanning as documentation: capturing ephemeral surfaces before they disappear

A scanner is not a camera. It has no lens, no depth of field, no perspective distortion. It records a surface in contact — flat, total, without interpretation. This is both its limitation and its particular power as a documentary tool.