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

A scanner is not a camera. It has no lens distortion, no depth of field, no perspective, no moment of decision about where to stand or what angle to shoot from. It records a surface in direct contact — flat, complete, without interpretation. Every point on the surface is equidistant from the sensor. Everything is in focus. Nothing is more or less important than anything else.

This is both its limitation and its particular power as a documentary tool.

Why not a camera

A camera always has a point of view. It is always somewhere, looking from a specific angle in specific light. Two photographs of the same wall, made an hour apart, will look different — the light will have moved, a shadow will have shifted, the photographer's position will have changed slightly. The camera introduces subjectivity even when the photographer is trying to be objective.

The scanner removes this. When I place the scanner against a wall, I am not choosing a composition. I am registering a section. The result is closer to a map than a photograph — a 1:1 record of a specific area of surface, without the mediation of optics or light or the photographer's body in space.

For documenting the layered, accidental surfaces that interest me — the palimpsest of paint and marks and weathering that accumulates on an urban wall over decades — this directness is essential. I want the surface, not a photograph of the surface.

The methodology in practice

I work with a portable flatbed scanner — the kind designed for document digitisation, light enough to carry in a bag, with enough resolution to record fine texture. I press it flat against the surface and move it in overlapping sections, later stitching the scans into a single image.

The process is slow and conspicuous. People ask what I am doing. The answer — scanning the wall — is usually met with confusion, occasionally with suspicion, sometimes with interest. The strangeness of the activity is part of it. It forces a different quality of attention, both from me and from anyone watching.

What the scan records

A high-resolution scan of an urban surface contains an extraordinary density of information. Under magnification, you can read the stratigraphy of the wall — the sequence of paint layers, the age of different marks, the pattern of weathering and repair. You can see where a poster was applied and where it was scraped off. You can trace the outline of a tag that was painted over but not completely obscured.

This is documentary evidence in the strictest sense. It records not just what a surface looks like but what it is — its history, its material composition, its relationship to the people and weather and time that have acted on it.

The surfaces I document will not exist in this form for much longer. That is why the documentation matters.

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