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 city regenerates. Scaffolding goes up, hoardings appear, planning notices are posted and ignored. When they come down, everything is clean and new and identical. The surfaces are smooth. The colours are coordinated. The history has been painted over.

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 accumulated history of a place is visible at once. Layers of paint applied by different hands in different decades. Posters for events that have already happened. Tags made by people who no longer live in the neighbourhood. The ghost of a shopfront sign that hasn't existed for twenty years.

This is what I photograph. Not the before and not the after — the during. The city in the middle of revising itself, caught between versions, not yet decided what it intends to be.

The surface as archive

Every painted wall is a stratigraphic record. Archaeologists read the layers of a dig to reconstruct a timeline — each stratum corresponding to a period of habitation or abandonment. A street surface works the same way, except the layers are visible simultaneously. You don't have to dig. You just have to look.

What makes this photographic subject so urgent now is the speed of erasure. London's regeneration cycles have compressed dramatically. Neighbourhoods that were considered peripheral a decade ago are now desirable. The surfaces that accumulated during the years of neglect — the graffiti, the flyposting, the painted-over painted-over painted-over walls — are being removed not just physically but from memory. There will be no record that they existed unless someone made one.

A methodology

I work with a portable flatbed scanner rather than a camera for close surface work. The scanner records without perspective — it doesn't interpret depth or light direction or the photographer's position. The result is a document rather than a photograph: total, flat, forensic. Every crack, every layer, every mark is recorded with equal attention.

For architectural and street work I use a camera, but the impulse is the same: to record before the record becomes impossible. To insist that these surfaces — unglamorous, accidental, layered with the evidence of ordinary life — deserve the same attention we give to buildings that were designed to be looked at.

The city does not ask to be documented. That's exactly why it needs to be.

← Back to Notes