Katerina Jebb: «Fragment by fragment I compose my portraits»

To create her portraits, Katerina Jebb works with scanners – «only the medium of scanography can accurately reproduce the subject matter»

Katerina Jebb shooting for Lampoon

Katerina Jebb employs a domestic scanner as her primary tool to create direct digital impressions of her subjects. The technique – scanography – captures only what is placed in direct contact with the glass surface of the scanner. With no depth of field, anything not touching the plate disappears into absence. The resulting images are composed fragment by fragment, rendering intricate portraits and assemblages that hover between hyper-realism and abstraction. Skin, hair, fabric, metal, glass, plastic, perfume, and personal artefacts are all pressed against the scanner’s cold white light, producing digital portraits that exist somewhere between the intimate and the forensic. Jebb’s work occupies a unique space between document and concept, archive and portraiture – offering a meditation on the body, identity, and the material culture of the present.

Katerina Jebb

Katerina Jebb was born in England in 1962. In 1984 she moved to California to study photography. In 1989 Jebb relocated to Paris to pursue her interest in experimental photography. Progressively, she diversified, posing subjects and objects, exploring the medium in parallel with the expanding possibilities in digital technology.

In 2016 Jebb’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Musée Réattu Arles , France. Two years later Katerina Jebb was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum to collaborate on the exhibition ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’. Jebb’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Victoria & Albert Museum, Le Musée des Arts Decoratifs Paris, Musée Réattu Arles.