Artworks have been made from measured geometry before. ScanLAB Projects has spent more than a decade working with laser scanners, retracing Muybridge’s Yosemite in Post-Lenticular Landscapes, and point-cloud art, built from laser scans or from many photographs taken around a subject, has become an academic subject of its own.

The Vathography approach is different. At capture, it needs only a single photograph: we photograph freely with our camera, no additional equipment required, and the volume is inferred from the image itself.

The inferred depth map, originally meant to be an intermediate post-process pass, is elevated to the final artwork: the photograph distilled to its volume.

The practice redefines the photograph’s focus. It is no longer determined by the lens at capture. It becomes a creative choice, placed anywhere, at any distance, on one subject or across several at once.

This changes the process itself and gives us a new approach to photography: we compose with depth and volume, purposefully for Vathography.

Achieving all of this with the fine detail needed for high-resolution artworks has only recently become practical, with the release of Marigold V2. This inspired me to create Vathography and publish it on 1 October 2026. Thanks to the Marigold V2 team’s generous Apache 2.0 license, the approach is open to everyone, and I look forward to seeing what other artists create with it.