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.

Field Notes — Urban Surface Archive

There is a category of architecture that does not expect to be looked at. Industrial units on the edges of cities. Utility substations. Car parks. The backs of things — the service entrances, the loading bays, the parts of buildings that face other buildings rather than streets. These structures were designed to function, not to be admired, and that indifference to the gaze is precisely what makes them worth photographing.

Architectural photography, as a discipline, has always privileged intention. The buildings it documents are buildings that asked to be looked at — that were designed with the photograph in mind, often before they were built. The rendered image precedes the concrete. The photographer arrives to confirm what was already planned.

I am interested in the other kind. The building that has no relationship with its own image. That has never been in a magazine and never will be. That exists in a neighbourhood because it needed to exist somewhere, and this was the somewhere available.

What neglect does to a surface

Buildings that are not looked at are also, often, not maintained. And buildings that are not maintained develop a relationship with time that designed buildings resist. The surface accretes. Paint is applied over paint. Water finds its way in and leaves a trace when it goes. Moss establishes itself in the joints. Metal oxidises into colours that no architect specified.

This is not decay in the tragic sense. It is a building becoming more itself — accumulating evidence of its own existence, its own duration in a particular place and climate. The longer it is left alone, the more it has to say.

The ethics of attention

There is something ethically interesting about directing serious photographic attention at structures that have never received it. It is a minor act of redistribution — taking the apparatus of fine art documentation and applying it to the unglamorous, the unintended, the overlooked.

I don't think this is sentimental. The buildings I photograph are not beautiful in spite of their neglect — they are interesting because of what their neglect reveals. The surface is the record. The photograph is the argument that the record matters.

Some cities understand this instinctively. Naples does. Parts of east London still do, though for how much longer is uncertain. The question of which surfaces get preserved — and which are simply painted over and forgotten — is a question about what a city thinks is worth remembering.

I think the answer should be: more than it currently does.

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